While our country’s best rowers are competing on a somewhat windy lake in Rio, our local Vashon crews had their own summer regatta over at Green Lake in Seattle this past Saturday, and for the most part, if the rowing wasn’t quite as fast, there was still plenty of competition and good results for island crews.
The Green Lake Summer Extravaganza is getting tougher, and even Oregon State brought some of their women’s crews to the event.
Coming home in first place were three Vashon crews, with victories in the mixed double (Kim Goforth and son Tate Gill), novice men’s four (Oz and Bowie Hichens, Evan Stephanik, and Forest Dempsey, coxed by Hayden Rosen) and the novice women’s four (Selena and Aria Mildon, Pippa Slade and Olivia White, coxed by Josie Slade).
Overall, Vashon medalled in 12 of the 17 events entered, with rowers Oz Hichens (gold and two silvers) and Aidan Teachout (three silvers) leading the medal tally. There were impressive performances by a lot of crew members, but Bowie Hichens’ win in the novice four came after having rowed for only a week and on top of having had a pretty nasty skateboard accident.
Vashon’s two coxswains, Josie Slade and Hayden Rosen, did a great job, each coming home with four medals, including gold. It would seem the rowers need to stay away from skateboards though, with Slade toughing out a bad case of “road rash” from a high speed crash on her longboard earlier in the week.
A highlight race was the boys’ under 16 eight, where three crews crossed the line within two seconds of each other, with Vashon attaining the silver medal just behind their Green Lake hosts.
Vashon juniors start the fall season with a camp on Aug. 29 and there is plenty of encouragement for new rowers to sign up at vashoncrew.com. The juniors race until early November, including the prestigious Head of the Lake, hosted by the UW Huskies, and with at least a girls’ eight headed to Boston for one of the world’s largest regattas (the Head of the Charles) in October.
— Richard Parr is the head coach of the Vashon Island Rowing Club
