Austin Rowing Biography: Elisabeth Gardner

By Kourtney de Haas, Austin Rowing Club

One of the rotating topics featured on this blog will be the rowing biography of various ARC members.  We continue this week with Elisabeth Gardner, who has served on the Board of Directors for several years, including the last three years as President.

KdH: How/where/when did you discover the sport of rowing?

EG: I grew up in Comfort, Texas which is on the Guadalupe River – lots of canoeing and tubing, but no rowing.  I had probably seen rowing in the Olympics on TV, but it didn’t seem like something that was accessible to me so it didn’t make much of an impression.  I moved to Austin in 1994, but it took seven years of watching the graceful rowers on Town Lake for me to google rowing in Austin and discover the Austin Rowing Club.

KdH: How/when did you discover Austin Rowing Club?

EG: I took the Learn to Row class at ARC in July of 2001 and I knew immediately that this was the sport for me.  The LTR instructors I remember:  Paul Scripko, Arch Bell, and Darla Parker.  After completing LTR I jumped in with both feet.  I began going to the boathouse every evening to see if anyone needed any subs, I got together with other July LTR grads and formed Motley Crew and Austin Powerz, I helped form the Novice Competitive Women’s Crew, and finally we merged the Novice Women’s Crew with the Major Babes to form the Women’s Competitive Crew.

KdH: Do you have any outstanding memory or story, good or bad, related to rowing that you can share with us?

EG: Good – There have been many good rowing related memories, including winning gold, silver and bronze medals at the 2003 Masters Nationals regatta in Rancho Cordova, CA.  I hadn’t been rowing that long and although I had trained extremely hard for this, I still wasn’t sure I was ready.  Winning with my team was an incredible feeling and if I hadn’t been hooked before, this regatta did the trick!

Bad & Good – Installing the Heart of Texas race course has always been one of my favorite parts of regatta prep.  We used to borrow Capital Cruise’s bat boat and in shifts of 8-10 people we would form two assembly lines and move up and down the length of the course installing two lines of buoys at a time.  It’s hard work, but fun to do as a group.  Well… in 2003 things things started off smoothly.  We had almost completed the first two lines when I looked down the course and noticed an unusually high number of ducks on the lake.  The number kept growing and I remember saying, “please tell me those are ducks!”  They weren’t – they were loose buoys.  Unfortunately the twine that had been purchased to string the buoys wasn’t intended to be used in water and was falling apart almost instantly once it hit the water.  This meant we had 200 buoys that we were going to have to chase down and fish out of the water and even more that hadn’t been installed yet that would also have to be restrung!  That was the bad part.  The good part was that I instantly got on the phone and asked someone to send out an arc-announce to rally the troops and help re-string all of the buoys.  It was great to see the ARC community turn out in such a big number on such short notice to get the work done.

KdH: How often do you row now, and in what types of boats?

EG: Lately, I don’t row nearly as much as I’d like to.  Work has been extremely busy this year and I’ve been on the road more than usual.  I will row in any type of boat from singles to eights, but my favorites are doubles and eights.

KdH: Where is the best place you have ever rowed?

EG: The best place I’ve rowed outside Austin, of course, would be Strathclyde Park outside Glasgow, Scotland for the 2005 World Masters Regatta.

KdH: Do you have (or have had in the past) any special roles at Austin Rowing Club or other rowing organizations?

EG: I’ve been co-captain of the Women’s Competitive Crew, worked on many regatta committees including as Regatta Director, served on ARC’s Board of Directors as Vice-President, and I am currently President of ARC [editor's note: Elisabeth's term as President ended December 2010]

KdH: Do you see yourself still involved with the sport of rowing in five years?  If yes, do you have any goals you can share?

EG: Absolutely!  My goal is to row for so long, that USRowing has to add new masters categories!

KdH: If you were to be reincarnated as a piece of rowing equipment, what would you want to be?

EG: Definitely the impeller!  I want to feel the speed of the boat!

Austin Rowing Biography: Hamilton Richards

By Kourtney de Haas, Austin Rowing Club

One of the rotating topics featured on this blog will be the rowing biography of various Austin Rowing Club members.  We start this week with Hamilton Richards.

Hamilton Richards

KdH: How/where/when did you discover the sport of rowing?

HR: Having been around boats all my life, I don’t recall when I first propelled a boat while facing backwards, but my first outing in a sliding-seat boat would have been when I was 13. The school I was attending had had a rowing program for many years, my father had rowed there, and my grandfather, a teacher of English and Latin, had rowed and coached rowing there, so it would have been a pretty good bet that I would row (also, I couldn’t throw or catch a ball well enough to have any future in the other spring sport). During my student days there, a new boathouse was dedicated to my grandfather, with a plaque containing the famous verse from Virgil’s Aeneid, “Nunc, nunc, insurgite remis!” (“Now, now, lean into your oars!”)

KdH: How/when did you discover Austin Rowing Club?

HR: When is easier to recall than how: around 1983. Joanne and I had moved to Austin in 1978, and I suppose I must have noticed a boat on Town Lake, as it was called then, and tracked it to its landing spot, which was under the MoPac bridge.

KdH: Do you have any outstanding memory or story, good or bad, related to rowing that you can share with us?

HR: A few years ago I was visiting my brother Jim for a week in Ollala, WA, and he had very kindly put a Maas Aero at my disposal. He had been a rower in years past, but a broken wrist was proving troublesome, so I was sculling solo.  The first few days I rowed in the Colvos Passage, between Olalla and Vashon Island, the water was splendid–like a mill pond for hours at a time–and the rowing was wonderful. No motorboats, beautiful forested shoreline, blue skies. Conditions were perfect for a faster boat, but I was content in the Aero, in whose seaworthiness I had complete confidence.

The third or fourth day, I decided, for no particular reason, to take my cell phone along, and a good thing it was. After an hour or so, up sprang a brisk north wind, a flat calm became 2-foot waves in no more than 10 minutes, and the Aero’s cockpit was awash. The self-bailer was useless–water was pouring in over the gunwales far faster than it could drain out. Fully aware that I had found the Aero’s limits, I fought my way to the nearest shore, where there was a sort of beach and a house. I needed to know where I was, so I could tell Jim where to find me, but there was nobody home. There was, however, a car in the driveway with its doors unlocked, so I took the address from its registration. I called Jim on the cell phone, he found me, we loaded the Aero onto his car, and one of the rare truly lousy rowing days was over.

KdH: How often do you row now, and in what types of boats?

HR: Nowadays I’m a confirmed single sculler, preferably in boats made of wood, the structural material that’s been under development for 400 million years. I like to think that I row four times a week, but it’s probably more like three.

KdH: Where is the best place you have ever rowed?

HR: For me Lady Bird Lake is tied for best with Squam Lake, NH. The latter is beautiful and cool, instead of swans and cormorants you see loons and eagles, and you can drink the water. On the other hand, it is sometimes infested with motorboats, especially on weekends.

Probably the worst was the Nashua River, in Massachusetts. In recent years, thanks to the EPA, the Clean Water Act, and efforts of stalwart local citizens, it has been miraculously cleaned up*, but when I rowed on it, the water was gray and opaque with waste from upstream paper mills. Since it was already so polluted, the towns along its banks saw no harm in dumping their untreated sewage into it. We were told that if we ever fell into it, we would have to undergo a rigorous course of immunizations.

KdH: Do you have (or have had in the past) any special roles at Austin Rowing Club or other rowing organizations?

HR: I was Director of Sculling, back in the days when ARC scullers were a despised minority. Example: If a sweep crew damaged a boat, c’est la vie, but scullers were expected to pay for any repairs.

More recently I’ve been supplying and operating the software ARC uses for managing regattas and for keeping track of boat reservations and usage.

KdH: Do you see yourself still involved with the sport of rowing in five years?  If yes, do you have any goals you can share?

HR: If age-related deterioration doesn’t accelerate too much, I should still be rowing in five years (I’ll be only 76!). And that’s a good enough goal for me.

KdH: If you were to be reincarnated as a piece of rowing equipment, what would you want to be?

HR: Heh. A bow ball, of course.

Austin Rowing Biography: Carolyn Gondran

By Kourtney de Haas, Austin Rowing Club

One of the rotating topics featured on this blog will be the rowing biography of various ARC members.  We continue this week with Carolyn Gondran.

Carolyn Gondran

KdH: How/where/when did you discover the sport of rowing?

CG: For three of my four years of college I went to a small women’s college in my home town of Northampton MA, Smith College. My junior year I escaped to UCSD – it was a sports paradise! Year-round Tennis, softball, ultimate Frisbee, sand volleyball and in June of ’81 I took an introduction to rowing class at the multi-sport boat house on mission bay that UCSD shared with two other area colleges (which I learned about during my windsurfing class, same place). San Diego had great bike paths, I’d ride my bike from La Jolla to Mission bay to take the class. We learned in a barge, but I loved it anyway. The instructor, Joe (yes, I remember his name and his ratty sneakers), encouraged me to row on Smith’s team (the oldest women rowing program in the country) the next fall – which I did.

KdH: How/when did you discover Austin Rowing Club?

CG: I rowed with Lake Merritt Rowing Club in Oakland CA while I worked on my PhD at Berkeley. It was a very competitive light weight program (the other girls hated that rowing wasn’t my only priority in life). I only looked at post-docs in cities that had rowing and I got an offer at UT just before the San Diego Crew Classic. At the Crew Classic my coach introduced me to some people he knew from Austin and they introduced me to the masters competitive women. I turned 28 that year so – on to masters rowing. Also at that regatta I was able to arrange getting my boat on a northern California trailer to Masters Nationals in Oak Ridge transferred to ARC’s trailer and on to Austin and a rack in the boathouse.

KdH: Do you have any outstanding memory or story, good or bad, related to rowing that you can share with us?

CG: I’ve got a couple good bad weather stories: swamping boats (once right in front of the Coast Guard Academy’s boathouse – fastest rescue of a woman’s 8+ on record), having half the competition dock halfway through the race, wanting to dock mid-race but “Darn, I’m in second.”  But my all-time favorite rowing monent was at Masters Nationals in Miami (1990?) when UT’s lightweight Janousek 4+, the Bobbitt, was still stiff – it was a magic boat – and we had a perfect start. We had so much open water off the start (2-3 lenghts just in the breakage zone) that I was certain they must have called the race back. It was a magic boat – and a perfect start.

KdH: How often do you row now, and in what types of boats?

CG: As a (now only part-time) working mom, my schedule doesn’t align with many other peoples, and then it changes anyway. The end result is I’m not nearly as reliable as I’d like to be.  I end up in a single most of the time.

KdH: Where is the best place you have ever rowed?

CG: Austin is pretty high on the list. (But I love Cane River Lake.)

KdH: Do you have (or have had in the past) any special roles at Austin Rowing Club or other rowing organizations?

CG: I was equipment director for a term and a half, introducing pop-out washers. Later Sue and I bought the first pair of hatchet sweep blades for the club, with which we convinced the women’s team to collect the money for the first set of 8 light weight hatchets (we marked them as the pink set – thinking the men wouldn’t use them).
I used to do a lot of ITR classes too (but now I have two girl scout troops).

KdH: Do you see yourself still involved with the sport of rowing in five years? If yes, do you have any goals you can share?

CG: I’m coming up on 30 years in the sport, and plan on at least 30 more. (Darla, how are the plans coming for the boat house by Sun City?)

KdH: If you were to be reincarnated as a piece of rowing equipment, what would you want to be?

CG: What’s this “if” business? WHEN I am worthy of being reincarnated as a piece of rowing equipment … I’ll be a pair – the ultimate team boat.