General Clinton Aluminum Relay Race Sunday

We just came off of one the best paddling racing weekends of the year this past Memorial weekend. The General Clinton Canoe Regatta is out in beautiful upstate NY on the Susquehanna river. The mighty Susquehanna makes its start at the base of Otsego lake in Cooperstown, NY, yes the baseball hall of fame town. The small baseball obsessed town becomes a canoeing mecca for one weekend a year and we are lucky enough to get to enjoy the weekend with some of the best paddlers and friends we’ve got. Teams come from all over North America to compete in tons of races starting on Friday with the shorter races going on both Saturday and Sunday ending on Monday with the 70 mile canoe race, yep that’s 70 miles all in one shot!

We arrived on Saturday morning to the most beautiful summery weather anyone could ask for. After picking up our race number and chicken dinner tickets for the 70 miler on Monday we headed up to our favorite spot in Cooperstown, Cooley’s Irish pub, to wait for the rest of our friends to show up. After a relaxing cocktail and some chicken wings the rest of the Berkshire Outfitters Mixed Nuts (our aluminum relay racing team) arrived in town. We have a tradition every year to paddle “the swamp” the first section of the race which is windy, pushy and full of nice big strainers for practice on Saturday. This section of the river becomes much faster with the water release they have for the actual race day so it’s fun to float thru at a nice pace chatting it up with our friends who we haven’t seen since the winter months.

 After finishing up our float we decided we would head back up to Cooley’s pub for some food, now this is in integral piece of the weekend. As we were hanging out in Cooley’s having some dinner, I received a text from one of the other Mixed Nuts teammates saying his partner who would be doing his leg of the relay tomorrow morning wouldn’t be able to race with us. This was a bummer so we all sat and starting texting other paddlers we knew hoping we could fill the spot last second. We jokingly mentioned our problem to our waitress, Hannah, whose ears perked right up, we said “you busy tomorrow? Interested in doing a canoe race?” Now this waitress was not a paddler but she seemed to be in good shape, we found out later she was a big track star and coach, perfect!!! After waiting for all other prospects to answer our texts we decided that the waitress was as good a fill in as anyone and she was more then happy to help us out and super excited that we asked her. Berkshire Outfitters Mixed Nuts team was complete and ready for the race tomorrow!!!





left to right : Travis, Hannah, Terese, Julie, Jessie, John, Terry, Marge, Jeff, Neil

  

Now this year we are high tech so I was able to video tape all the exchanges of the relay legs so you can really get a firsthand glance at a well-oiled machine known as the Berkshire Outfitters Mixed Nuts aluminum canoe racing team!! We finished out the 35 mile race on Sunday with a time of 4 hours, 14 minutes and 28 seconds, 6^th place out of 31 teams, not too shabby at all!!!