December 27, 2022
Coxless pair or double scull?
I never thought I’d use that sequence of words. I had to Googly the shit out of this to have any context.
[Authors disclosure: The following excerpts were taken from the online source boatbiscuit.com during the course of researching what the fuck I was talking about.]
Double Scull
In sculling, athletes use two oars, referred to as sculls, rather than one. In a “double scull,” which is also called the “double or 2x,” two individuals, each with two sculls, maneuver the boat.
Coxless pair
This boat has two rowers outfitted with oars on the left and right sides, each with one oar apiece. There is no coxswain, in this case, so the rudder is attached to the boat through cables.
It is important to note that, in both cases, the rowers are facing backwards, making it exceptionally difficult to see where they are going. A coxswain aboard would not only control the foot pedals steering the boat, but would also be facing forward making navigating the boat a much simpler task.
This tidbit of information, while rather obscure, will seem less random shortly…
During our return stay at La Paz, the northerlies that had been kicking up things in the anchorage had managed to substantially tap into our sleep schedule. Whether it was getting up regularly to check our snubber line, or being bounced and rolled around as we swung in twenty five to thirty knot gusts, or simply being awoken by a creaking line or halyard knock as you finally managed to drift off, we found ourselves getting little more than snippets of rest.
When the wind finally subsided and the sea state calmed, we welcomed our first sound sleep in three days.
It had been nearly eight solid uninterrupted hours into that sleep, at about six thirty in the morning, just as the light of the new day was beginning to illuminate the anchorage but had not yet risen above the horizon.
Light enough to see.
Not that it mattered to us. We were sound asleep…
…WHAAAM!
The sound tore us from the haze of drifting aimlessly through some distant and unfocused dream…not a care…
…to a bolt upright instant consciousness, simultaneously amplified by a physical jolt felt through the bed…a shock that conveyed no other possibility other than impact.
What the fuck?!
I repeated the phrase two or three more times as I scrambled out of bed and stumbled up the companionway steps in my underwear.
What the fuck?! I coughed out another one as I peered out of the cockpit, looking around in a state of groggy confusion without seeing anything amiss anywhere around us.
Then I saw a shadow of movement to our starboard, just beyond and below the level of our toe rail. Was is someone in a dinghy? Had a God-damned dinghy hit us? I hadn’t heard an engine…
As the shadow drifted a bit further away from the edge of the deck, it materialized into two people sitting in a boat. I could see it was one of those crew type rowing boats.
What the fuck happened? I managed to clarify my question.
They said nothing. I couldn’t even be sure they heard me. They were moving pretty slow.
I remember in the past seeing six or eight people rowing these crew boats with an extra dude aboard. I always assumed the extra dude was an evolutionary leftover from the old days…a viking who used to hack off the arms of rowers who started slacking…now become more of a navigator and cheerleader than an armed motivator. The coxswain.
There were only two guys on this boat.
They both looked pretty dazed and confused.
Both of them were holding oars. Two each; though at the time it didn’t seem significant. Apparently it distinguishes what you call them.
What happened? This time I became a bit more civil, except I was still speaking the wrong language.
Still, they said nothing. The guy at the back was moving around a bit more and had started paddling backwards a bit. The guy at the front was still mostly just sprawling and groaning.
After a bit more silence, it was quite apparent that they were still pretty dazed.
The fog of confusion began to lift for me as I realized these two guys had probably been rowing like Hell just moments ago, both facing the opposite direction that they were moving. A long, sleek, low-to-the-water boat. As fucking hydrodynamic as the science of physics can possibly imagine and conjure up.
Built for speed…which it must have built up a LOT of.
Two young athletes. Working hard. Pushing it. Concentrating one hundred percent on the rhythm of their rowing. In the zone. Momentarily forgetting that the same laws of physics permitting them to fly along at a speed upwards of ten miles per hour also prevent two solid objects from passing through one another.
Apparently neither guy looking ahead for only a short time. All it takes.
The math question reads something like this:
If a four hundred pound object composed of lightweight material and flesh moving at ten miles per hour collides with a forty two thousand pound mostly metal object that is stationary, how long will it take for the moving object to stop and how far will the stationary object be moved?
Answer: Zero to both. Zero time to stop and zero feet moved.
The significance of that reality, literally, had a much more instant and profound impact on them than us.
I tried a different tack… ¿Están bien? Are you alright?
The guy at the back of the boat gave me a thumbs up. The guy at the front, on the other hand, was still stretched out moaning, like he hadn’t yet fully verified his neck wasn’t broken and back wasn’t paralyzed.
A couple more minutes passed.
The guy at the back had started rowing gingerly. The other guy still was pretty much a heap.
¿Quieren ayuda? Do you want help? My attempt to be a bit less of an asshole became more pro-active.
The rowing guy waved me off. The other guy appeared to have verified all his limbs were capable of movement but still didn’t seem fully aware of where he was.
The boat eventually disappeared into the distance. It was the last I saw of the two guys.
I looked at our hull and couldn’t find even a scuff.
About an hour later I saw what looked like the same boat rowing along about a thousand feet away from us. In place of the two guys were now two women. They were looking over their shoulders frequently as they rowed. Apparently the story had been told.
Later, when I began to reconstruct the story myself, I realized the comedy of the terminology I had stumbled across.
In retrospect, I so wish that, during the moment, I could have leapt into the cockpit and in the best King’s English cried out, “are ye not double scullers? Pay attention to your direction lads, lest ye be mistaken for a coxless pair!”
Okay…it wouldn’t have worked in Spanish.
sv-exit.com 