Petaluma’s Gallup rows to success in ‘Our boat’

I admit it. In 2009, as a board member of the North Bay Rowing Club, I voted in favor of buying a $7,000 single-person rowing shell.

It’s a Fluidesign “EL” model built in London, Ontario. This is a boat against whose purchase there was a strong argument: Because its “feet” (a set of shoes on tracks) can’t be moved to the stern or bow once the rower has left the dock, it’s suited only to individuals. Club boats should be sturdy, solid, and above all, adjustable on the water. As I recall it, however the voice calling for its purchase, that of a national-class rower, was very persuasive. Should our club have purchased that boat? You be the judge.

I was so new to the sport, to California, and to Petaluma, I should have never been given a spot on the board, or so I think now. But what is Petaluma, if not welcoming, and rewarding to those who offer to help?

On June 11, 18-year-old Shannon Gallup, of Petaluma’s North Bay Rowing Club, took 11th place in the 2017 Youth Nationals in the single scull, in a photo finish. It had been just her sixth race in a single, a boat that I had come to think of fondly as ours. Officially, it’s named after Dr. Tom Vaughan, an NBRC member who had generously donated his time and energy to multiple charitable causes around the world, as well as one well-rowed Empacher single scull to NBRC.

The new Fluidesign took his name because it was bound to go to races, and win them in his memory. But in my mind, and around the yard, this boat is known as “The Blue Grin,” because it brings a smile of satisfaction to the face of anyone who rows it.

For Nationals, The Tom Vaughan/Blue Grin was trailered 2,990 miles to Nathan Benderson Park in Sarasota, Florida. It took five days. Another club had offered Gallup two faster boats, but as she put it, “once I realized that there could be something wrong with the borrowed boat or I might not like it, I decided to take the Tom Vaughan.”

Prior to the Covered Bridge Regatta in Late April in Eugene, Oregon, where Gallup took third in her first ever solo race, she had always competed in “sweep” or “crew” rowing, which is emphasized among junior and collegiate crews in the U.S. Sweep rowing uses bigger boats carrying coxswains armed with steering mechanisms and voice projection systems.

In the Youth Nationals time trials on June 9, Shannon had neither. She was steering and rowing alone, in our 26-foot-long, 11-foot-wide, 14-kilogram blue beauty. When she took 12th in the trials on Friday, she advanced to the semis on Saturday. Gallup told me that because she’s a senior and she’s been accepted to Boston University on a rowing scholarship, unlike a lot of the other competitors, she wasn’t panicked during the races. “I mean, legally, BU has to take me, right?”

As Shannon worked with her coaches before Nationals, I felt a kinship. One morning, as Coach Steve Genise, a former Cal rower, gave her direction, I said from the dock, “I wish I were you!” She replied, “then you’d have to do my training!”

So true. I’m just a middle-aged woman with a hobby called sculling. But still I missed our boat while Gallup was gone. I’m 53, and began rowing when we moved here in 2007. Raised by Southern Californians, I had never lived in California, and when I discovered Petaluma, with its straightforward downtown and a strong community, I also discovered the river.

Rowing held a very faint family connection for me too; shortly before he passed away from the heart disease that had claimed his father even earlier, my dad had discovered the rowing machine. Somehow, I felt, I needed to row.

When I interviewed the triumphant Gallup over breakfast at Della Fattoria, she told me that the biggest difference between racing in sweep and sculling boats is that, “The start is so quiet. There’s just all this effort, every one of us pulling her hardest. Eight people just rowing along. It’s weird.”

Other clubs may have more medals and titles than we do, but our scrappy little club, one that calls five shipping containers home, and rows off of docks in the backyard of Van Bebber Brothers, just sent its seventh junior rower to Nationals. This year, Shannon Gallup rowed her races in “our” boat, one which perhaps no club in its right mind would ever have purchased.