The sculling boat I row was made by Graeme King, who has a shop in the Vermont town where I live. He is a friend and a man I admire, not only because of the beauty of his boats, but because he is at once exceedingly precise and yet oddly mysterious, which is a quality that he shares with his boats. He was born in Australia and for awhile he worked on boats at Harvard, but now in his own shop he makes eights, fours, doubles and singles. Recently, a company (Elite Rowing) has been formed to make composite, or plastic versions of King’s designs. In his own shop he works alone, surrounded by the smell of sawdust, epoxy and polyurethane. He is a careful, restrained man, but when he says something, people tend to listen. Once, when I asked him how he learned to make racing singles, he said, “Trial and error.”

My boat is about twenty nine feet long, ten inches wide at the waterline, and is made of ash covered with a tropical hardwood. It weighs thirty-five pounds when rigged and is known as a “racing single.” It has a sliding or rolling seat, which is on wheels that go back and forth in a track. You propel the boat through the water with your legs, back, and arms. Frankly, it is much more like rowing a violin than anything else, and part of the skill of sculling is knowing that since you are much heavier than the boat, you have to be careful about how you throw your weight around. If you rush up the slide to try to go faster by rowing more strokes a minute, you will stop the boat in the water. You must remember the counter-intuitive truth that the way to make the boat go faster is to slow down part of the stroke. It sounds simple, of course, but it is hard to do. Still, as you learn how to slow down to go faster, you begin to see how the mystery of sculling can get mixed up with other things, such as, in my case, writing novels and being a father. Continue reading Sculling and the Writing Life…