I have always loved being on the water. Whether sailing on my uncle’s wooden boat, Wings, in San Diego Bay, gliding on catamarans in Hawaii and Costa Rica, crabbing and shrimping in Discovery Bay or just lazily paddling a kayak, the water just feels like home to me.

A year ago, the Pool Committee at Cape George had an auction to raise money for upgrades to the residential community's indoor swimming pool, next to Discovery Bay. One of the items up for bid was the opportunity to row along with the “Tuf as Nails” master's women's rowing team in its newly improved, eight-person shell designed and built by George Pocock. The all-female team had raced in San Diego and fell in love with the shell, which needed extensive work and loving care. The team pooled its money, bought the boat and had it shipped to its Port Townsend home in the Northwest Maritime Center’s boathouse.

As far back as the late 1920s, George Pocock was building boats for the nation’s elite college rowing teams. With Harvard and Yale on the East Coast and Stanford, California and Washington on the West Coast all vying for elite status, Pocock would examine trees for the perfectly grained wood. Tied closely to each of the teams, Pocock not only designed and built the boats, he occasionally advised individual rowers regarding their technique.

Having read the book “The Boys in the Boat” by Daniel James Brown, which chronicles the trials, tribulations and ultimate success of the University of Washington rowing team at the 1936 “Hitler” Olympics, I was determined to win the bid for the opportunity to ride in a Pocock boat.

At the auction, there were three of us bidding, but that soon dropped to two, and as I bid $50 and heard “Going, going …, ” a bid of $52 was announced. I was really disappointed, but $50 had been my self-imposed limit.

“Fifty-five” I heard from my friend Julia, sitting next to me. My longtime tennis partner and her husband were visiting for the weekend, and she was bidding on my behalf.

The only other bidder yelled out “$58!”

Julia countered with “$60.”

After what seemed like a long pause, but no further bidding, I held my breath as the auctioneer again announced, “Going, going … gone.”

My friend had given me the ultimate gift!

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I said, laughing as the auctioneer brought Julia the certificate confirming victory.

As this summer of beautiful rowing weather waned, I began to wonder if my ride with the Tuf as Nails team would materialize. Since I know two of the team members, I called one to find out. Sure enough, I would be rowing with them just prior to the 2015 Wooden Boat Festival.

READY TO ROW

When I got the call from my friend Barb Hager to schedule the trip for the next week, I became really excited, and then I checked the weather forecast. An early fall had hit our peninsula, and there was a chance of rain predicted for nearly every day of the upcoming week. Friday dawned gray and cold, and my 5 a.m. wake-up call aroused me from my warm bed in almost total darkness. I dressed in shorts, with a long-sleeved shirt under a short-sleeved one and topped with a warm jacket. I grabbed a warm knit hat and gloves. Water shoes completed my outfit. Coffee was out of the question as there is not a head on an eight-person shell.

Upon my arrival at the Northwest Maritime Center in downtown Port Townsend, the team was gathering for our 6:15 a.m. launch. Each member knew that I would be joining them for a practice row and each one was accepting, at least on the surface, of having an interloper along. Almost immediately, I was handed a life belt and taught how to use it if the need arose. Oh, how I hoped there would not be the opportunity to test it.

The beautiful Husky Challenger was stored at the top of the shell rack, about 15 feet in the air. How, I wondered to myself, would we be getting it around the boats below it and down to our shoulder level? Very carefully, I discovered. At 60 feet in length and weighing around 200 pounds, the boat is nevertheless fragile, partially due to the one-eighth-inch hull thickness.

Wanting to include me fully in the whole rowing experience, my teammates for the day readily assigned me tasks. First was to help take each of the eight oars from their assigned spaces and deposit them in that order along the beach. Though it weighs only about 5.5 pounds, an oar is about 12 feet long, so somewhat unwieldy to carry gracefully … OK, it was unwieldy for me to carry gracefully.

As some of us transported oars, others were determining the best location to place the two mechanical lifts that would lower the boat to our shoulder level. As a team member and a helpful husband placed the lifts so as to avoid riggers of boats stacked below ours, they pushed either to the front of the boathouse or to the rear, careful to keep our boat level and to avoid the riggers of the boats stacked beneath ours. Riggers are the V-shaped aluminum tubing that protrude from the edges of the boat and hold the brass oarlocks, and with four of them on each side of each of the boats below ours, the task of lowering our shell seemed daunting to me.

There would be four of us on one side of the boat and four on the other as it reached shoulder height. Being careful to touch only the edge of the boat itself, we each reached for the hand-hold near our individual seat and raised the 200-pound behemoth to our shoulders.

I could not believe the pain that carrying just one-eighth of the boat inflicted on my shoulder. Nor could I believe the maneuvering it took to get the boat into the 45-degree water. Having been assigned the number-three seat, I located my oar and prepared to insert it into the oarlock.

Because this was the first time since its restoration that the boat was back in the water, I was not the only one who did not know how to lock the oar in place, and that gave me some degree of satisfaction. Fastening my oarlock in place would be the first, but not the last time that the women in the number-two and number-four seats would come to my rescue throughout the next couple of hours.

IN THE BOAT

The shock of wading in the cold water along with attempting to actually get seated on a tiny seat that slid forward and backward, while not putting my feet in the boat's fragile bottom took my total concentration. But I wasn’t actually as awkward as I expected.

However when number-four seat said, “Put your feet in the shoes,” I discovered that my Crocs were too large to insert into the leather shoes attached to the inside hull, which would keep my feet anchored during our row. Number-two seat said, “Hand me your Crocs” and reached back to take them off my feet so that I could insert my now cold, wet feet into the shoes.

“Slide all of the way forward,” instructed number-four seat, and as I did so, my knees rested against my chest. Being one of the least agile persons I know, in addition to having an artificial hip, my body did not react well to being in that position, and I instantly got a cramp in my leg.

“I need to straighten out for a minute. I have a cramp,” I announced. Luckily, it went away almost immediately.

My friend Barb was the coxswain on this day, and after donning her microphone and giving me some instruction on what to do with my oar, we headed south toward the paper mill. The flat, shovel-shaped blade at the end of the oar was supposed to just skim the water as we rowed. In addition to that, we were expected to row in complete unison. Seven of us did. I had trouble keeping the oar locked tight in the oarlock, skimming the water and being in sequence with the rest of the crew.

“Just watch the person in front of you, not your own oar,” instructed number-four seat. That worked for four of five strokes. A half-dozen times I “caught a crab,” which is not a good thing in rowing, as that is when your oar goes too deep in the water and could lead to capsizing the boat. I absolutely did not want to be responsible for dumping seven experienced rowers, the coxswain and myself into the chilly waters of Port Townsend Bay.

I was in excruciating pain each time my knees and chest touched on my slide toward the stern. I was slightly embarrassed when I heard the instruction for starboard rowers to row and, in my mind that was me. Of course, since we are facing the stern, I was actually on the port side. Oops!

SLEEK BOAT’S GLIDE

Oh, how I loved the times when I just rode, keeping my oar flat on the top of the water to steady the boat. I also loved the glide of the sleek boat on the water, and communing with porpoise and seals in the early dawn on the bay.

As we made the turn for home, I rowed when I heard my seat number called. I learned that, when practicing, sometimes just the bow four rowed while the aft rowers steadied the boat with oars on the water. Sometimes it was reversed, and sometimes individual seat numbers were called by the cox.

My last trial was getting out of the boat once we reached the shoreline. Thanks again to the rower in the number-four seat, I was able to do that without embarrassing myself. Then reversing the procedure of getting the boat into the bay, we eased it out. As we lifted the boat to our shoulders, it was necessary to turn it over as we hoisted it, thus drenching ourselves with the water that sat in the bottom of the boat. We maneuvered the boat up from the beach and lowered it to supports so that we could wash the salt water from it and then dry it with soft cloths.

As we slowly entered the boathouse, we lowered the Husky Challenger on the two lifts to raise it back into its place high above the other stacked boats. Again, maneuvering it around the riggers of the boats below while keeping it level took much patience. We were all extremely cold and wet as we began leaving the Northwest Maritime Center. I got to my Prius before I realized that my life belt was still secure around my waist. I returned it and rushed back to my car, where I cranked the heat up to 80 with the fan going full-bore.

I was tired and knew I would be sore. When I arrived home, I quickly changed my clothes and went out to play pickleball. Why I made this appointment, I do not know. I much rather would have had a good, long soak in a hot lavender bubble bath. As it was, my aching legs were slow to move, and I did not warm up until we had played for nearly an hour.

I was so impressed by this group of women who arise at 5 a.m. three or four days a week to row, except in the dead of winter. They are strong, they are dedicated and they truly love their sport. Certainly they earn their team moniker, Tuf As Nails, every single day.

As for me, I realized a dream and at the same time understood that I should not pursue the rigors that being on a rowing team entails.

(Jeannie Ramsey is a retired high school counselor who moved to Cape George from the Portland area in 2004. She currently volunteers for Dove House Advocacy Services and organizes the nonprofit's annual "Walk a Mile in Her Shoes" event.)