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Coaching couple start sculling school Married couple who were both championship-caliber rowers and coaches use instruction in their sport to make Northern Neck B&B a unique school known as Calm Waters Rowing
By ROB HEDELT LANCASTER--Will Gamble, a trim 58-year-old from Naples, Fla., is filled with trepidation as he heads into the TV room in the Inn at Levelfields, an open and airy Northern Neck mansion built in the 1850s. He's about to get a critique of his skills in the new hobby/sport/exercise of competitive rowing that has lured him halfway up the East Coast for instruction. The bed-and-breakfast side of the business enterprise has already pampered Gamble and his wife, Delores, providing them and the other six guests with a sumptuous breakfast of pancakes and assorted fruits and berries. But long before that, they were put to work by the other side of the business-- an Olympic-caliber sculling school called Calm Waters Rowing. While the sun was coming up, Gamble and the others rolled out of bed and boarded a small bus for the short ride to the school's nearby Camps Mill Pond. There, each rower selected one of the school's sleek and shiny rowing shells. They're narrow, lightweight boats between 20 and 30 feet long, with seats that slide as they're pulled through the water by long, custom-rigged oars. Once they'd carried the 30- to 40-pound boats to a small pier and launched them, the rowers set out across the 90-acre pond. Their mission was to remember and incorporate what they had been taught the day before: Keep elbows relaxed, hands down, head up, wrists flexed and so forth. Watching all this from a small johnboat were Charlotte Hollings and John Dunn, a married couple with 53 years of competitive rowing. He started at Cornell University, eventually rowing on the U.S. national team and winning World Championship medals. He coached at Cornell for 25 years, taking the women's team to a national championship in 1989. She rowed at the University of Virginia and on the U.S. team, earning medals in two World Championships. She coached at Stanford, Boston University and Cornell, where she and John met and eventually married. After coaching stints at two other rowing schools in the '90s, they decided to start a school of their own.
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