The Vashon Island Rowing Club had a strongs howing at its first fall season regatta, the Tail of the Lake Regatta, where 12 of the 17 boats VIRC entered placed in the top three.
“I was very impressed with the kids,” said assistant coach Tom Kicinski. “They handled themselves well out there and used what we practiced on, especially in the turns.”
The unique head race, which took place on Lake Union on Sunday, was a 4k course that began at the Aurora Avenue Bridge, ran to the south end of the lake and looped north to finish at Gas Works Park.
Two crews brought home first-place hardware this year. Shannon Lipe and Hannah Russell in the junior women’s double crossed the finish in 17:12, and the masters women quad, rowed by Marilyn Kleyn, Su DeWalt, Debby Jackson and Kim Goforth also finished first in 15:32.
Of the six second-place finishes for Vashon, the most notable was the junior women’s eight, which crossed the finish just three seconds behind their first-place competitors, who were ranked fifth in the nation at the Junior National Championships in June. Rowing that boat for Vashon were Halimah Griffin, Maya Krah, Taegan Lynch, Emmie Kehoe, Kirsten Girard, Kalie Heffernan, Anna Ripley and Bryn Gilbert, with coxswain Ally Clevenger.
Other second-place winners from the junior crew were Isaiah Mosser-Rohe and Eli Sedgemore in the men’s junior double, and Heffernan and Ripley in the women’s open double, a “grade 10” race, as coach Richard Parr described it.
“The other clubs have their assumed best double combination of rowers,” Parr said. “For these girls to come in second is pretty impressive.”
Emma Dubois, Emily Milbrath, Caprial Turner, Mei Lee Vandervelde and coxswain Olivia Mackie also took second in the women’s novice quad.
Kicinski said he was pleased with the entire novice team’s performance at their first regatta.
“The girls novice quad did really, really great putting it together,” he said.
Parr agreed. “They did a great job, especially the coxswains with the turns. They did brilliantly.”
The competitive men’s masters eight crew finished with an impressive second-place time of 13:20, while a second women’s masters quad came in five seconds behind the VIRC first-place quad at 15:37.
“They’ve put in a lot of work, done extra training sessions and it shows,” Parr said.
Steve Haworth entered the men’s masters single race and placed third out of field of 12. Haworth then jumped into the masters eight, filling in for an injured rower and racing a total of about five miles that day.
Third-place junior wins were in the men’s quad, with Tate Gill, Gus Magnuson, Sedgemore and Mosser-Rohe, in the men’s four, with Charles Elliott, Baxter Call, Nathan Petram, Jack Mask and novice coxswain Ellie Hughes, and in the women’s quad with Gilbert, Anne Gaspers, Mary Lawrence and Kai Li Scheer.
— Marianne Metz Lipe is on the publicity committee for the Vashon Island Rowing Club.
