2004-05-13 – Father and son Rum runners
I made it there a half hour early tonight after being late on Tuesday because I left work 15 minutes earlier and beat all the rush hour traffic. Keith Canny also showed up early and guess what we talked about?
Yup … paddling.
Keith Canny explained that he and Lee Jarpey have been paddling well together since their strokes finally started to match. They had paddled together for a whole season before that happened. They tried different ways to work on their strokes before they tried alternating 1 hard and 1 normal stroke continuously during practice. Keith said that every now and then they would get out of sync and he would paddle normal when Lee paddled a normal stroke. That allowed Keith to feel what part of Lee’s stroke was most powerful and vice versa. Eventually, they knew each other’s power strokes better and better. Now they were a hard team to drop.
Tonight Keith’s son, Eric Canny, and Rick Lorenzen (that’s me) paddled with Ed Arenz and Keith Canny on a cool and cloudy Thursday evening at 5pm from the Fairgrounds boat launch on the Rum River. Keith and Ed were using Ed’s black racer with some new special waterproof and ultraviolet proof coating he had bought from Kenn Ketter. Eric and Rick were using Rick’s pro-am woodstrip racing canoe. Keith and Ed tried to drop us right away. Once we got up on their side wake, Eric and I kept on it. I did a better job of calling the huts this time than I did last time I had paddled with Eric. He had told me that he weighed 206 pounds, but his power on the paddle made him seem much lighter than that. Kathy and John Sullivan came around the corner heading downstream and we exchanged quick greetings.
We took turns trying to drop each other on the way up to the sandbar island. They had the inside all the way around the first bend upstream and we dropped back a canoe length, but didn’t lose their first wake wave. As soon as they eased up, we pulled up alongside again. As we crossed the river, Eric and I took to the shallows right along the shoreline and they dropped back a canoe length. Eric ducked under low tree branch and kept paddling. My baseball cap was brushed off my head and I hollered so Eric stopped paddling. My hat had just dropped behind me into the canoe so I got it back on right away.
We took turns trying to drop each other all the way up to the sandbar island, but neither team could drop the other more than 2 canoe lengths. It seemed a lot closer tonight than it had been on other nights. We had seen a goose standing on a floating log on one leg pretending to be a flamingo and a pair of wood ducks paddling away from us. Further on we saw another goose hunkered low to guard seven little fuzzy goslings as they scrambled up a steep grassy bank past an upside-down red canoe. The sun had come out from the clouds and lit up the dark amber water between the maples now fully dressed in bright green. We grabbed our plastic water or Powerade bottles and gulped a drink without stopping our canoes.
On the way back, we rode side by side and told stories and jokes and laughed a lot while riding each other’s side wakes until we came in sight of the concrete County 116 bridge. Then it suddenly got quiet as we all tried to paddle harder without letting the other team know. Ed and Keith were riding our side wake about half a canoe length back when we started sprinting and they slowly pulled ahead in the hundred or more strokes it took for us to cross the imaginary finish line under the leading edge of the bridge. They had just barely beaten us. I had to remind myself that they are a lighter team in a faster canoe hull, but it didn’t help much. Another quick drink without slowing the canoes down much and then more jokes and laughter.
It was good to have friends to paddle with, and it was even better to have a father and son paddling side by side.
11:45:58 PM 
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