row2k Features
That Shell from 'The Shell Game'
January 7, 2016
Ed Hewitt, row2k.com

A clue from Stephen Kiesling's 'The Shell Game'

Last year around this time, I was invited by Saratoga Rowing Association chief Chris Chase to accept the American Junior Coaches Conference Lifetime Service Award on behalf of row2k, and before driving with my family back to New Jersey in a bruising snowstorm (during which we listened to the Seahawks – Packers game on the radio, yipes), we stopped by the SRA boathouse to have a look, poke around, and stretch a little before hitting the road.

After mapping and following a route to the boathouse, we did a few circles and U-turns, and as we drove into a small clearing, the entrance became obvious in the extreme, marked as it was by a black-and-white striped shell standing on end surrounded by a small garden covered with snow, like a gentle beacon for rowers.

In the dead of a cold, snowy winter, the lake was stone frozen (although a very cool bubble-ator kept the water around the docks from freezing), and Fish Creek and Saratoga Lake covered not with rowers, but with the tents and four-wheelers of folks ice-fishing in the dim sunlight sneaking through a pre-storm cloud cover.

On the way out, something about the entrance marker to the boathouse demanded attention, and I stopped briefly to take a quick phone photo of the shell garden. A few days later, I wrote Chris to say thanks, and asked about the shell.

"Think 'The Shell Game' about that boat," Chase replied. "I was told by the author that it's the actual boat in that book."

Months down the line, we were finally in the same place at the same time, and I spoke to Chase about the shell; here is its story.

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When Saratoga was getting underway in 1997-98, the program began growing quickly, and Chase and his team bought a few older wooden Schoenbrods from the Coast Guard Academy. While picking up the hulls, Chase noticed a rack of boats that needed a lot of work and asked about them.

"They said go ahead, take it," Chase recalls, and he didn't need to be asked twice.

The shell was an unusual boat, a Robinson hull made entirely of composite materials, with no wood, which was extremely rare in the 10-15+ year-old vintage shells the SRA could afford at the time. Chase recalls that the riggers on the boat were all wrecked, and were also very specialized riggers, making it impossible to repurpose riggers from other hulls they had around the boathouse.

"We didn't know anything about it, but we called it the Phoenix, because there was so much work to be done on it, we would have to bring it back to life somehow," Chase said.

The Robinson shell as a planter at the SRA boathouse.
The Robinson shell as a planter at the SRA boathouse.

Chase had some decent help, as the famed bike maker Ben Serrota had a daughter on the team, and he took the riggers to his shop and completely refabricated them. The Phoenix was reborn.

"We got a lot of comments at regattas where people asked if we knew what the boat was," Chase recalls. "Apparently when they first came out, a lot of teams had tried them, but they were like bathtubs, with a lot of flex to them."

Chase and crew continued to row the hull, and eventually Chase got a call that revealed the provenance of the Phoenix.

"We still didn't really know what it was until I got a call from Stephen Kiesling, who said he was tracking down the boats from his book The Shell Game, and the one we had was the one from the book."

"After I learned about the history of the boat, I read the book, and would tell the kids about it - 'Do you know what this boat is?' - and all of a sudden it was like the Chariot of the Gods!" Chase recalls. "To be able to say to the kids to read this book, and by that way that's your boat, and they're reading rowing books and feeling really connected to it."

Ten years after Chase heard from Kiesling, a boat collector out west was trying to collect all the Robinson boats, apparently for history's sake, and tracked down the hull in Saratoga.

"Unfortunately for our Robinson, even thought it was called the Phoenix, by that time a tree had gone through it, and it wasn't coming back," Chase said with a reluctant laugh.

It turned out that, before Saratoga had a boathouse, the boat was on an outside rack along with four other older shells the team was using, and a tree fell on the rack, wrecking all five boats.

"So it was really cool, and it was sad when it happened, but we couldn't part with it," he said. "We lugged that thing around season after season until we got a place suitable to plant it. We had it up in the rafters for a long time, and when we made the circle someone said 'why don't we just put the boat out there and put our blade pattern on it?'

"So we made it a planter, and the center of the planter is that boat."

"When they called to see if we had it, I had to say 'well, kind of – we have half of it out in a planter…'"

"It's interesting because you noticed that boat for what it is, but unless you are a historian and connoisseur of rowing, it might not stick out to you," Chase notes.

Or unless you are driving in circles in the snow, and a striped beacon racing shell catches your eye.

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