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Canoe Poling National Championships were held on the Rappahannock River Friday and Saturday
Date published: 5/31/2009
BY CATHY JETT
Canoe poling champion Chip Cochrane stood in his boat yesterday and focused on the Rappahannock River's swollen, muddy waters as race timekeeper Anne Rock began the countdown. "Five, four, three, two, one. Go, Chip, go," she and Cochrane's wife Lani yelled. With that, Cochrane thrust a 12-foot aluminum pole into the shallow river bottom and pushed off on his first trip in the slalom division of the Canoe Poling National Championships. The circular course laid out in the rapids near the old Embrey Dam site required that he and 11 other competitors execute turns and backward maneuvers dictated by different colored buoys placed on rocks in the river. Racing against the clock, Cochrane poled his canoe all the way around the first buoy, a maneuver known as "tying the knot," before ferrying, or pushing across the river, to the second buoy. The river, which had risen sharply after Friday's storm, kept trying to turn the bow of his craft upstream, but he managed to keep it in a fairly straight line to save time. Competing in the slalom takes strength, strategy and technique, said Scott Stepenuck an engineer from Ballston Spa, N.Y., who is the national chairman of the American Canoe Association's Canoe Poling Division. The two-day championships, which began Friday with a wildwater race won by Lani Cochrane, drew about 18 men and two women from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia. It was the first time that the event had been held in Fredericksburg, the new home of the American Canoe Association. "We wanted to come down and connect with the ACA," said Harry Rock, the author of two books and a video on canoe poling. "We were looking to a midpoint, too, and it's a new river for us." Canoe poling, which was recognized as a competitive sport by the ACA in 1965, has a long and colorful history. Early man used saplings to propel dugouts up and down streams long before the paddle was invented, and voyageurs used wooden poles to help them navigate wilderness rivers before there were any roads. Boatmen used poles to help Gen. George Washington and his troops cross shallower sections of the Delaware during the American Revolution. And Lewis and Clark poled their boats up the Missouri on their famous expedition.
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