STILL THINKING

photographs courtesy of the Dusharms

STILL THINKING is a Redwing 18, and Barry Dusharm's first power boat.

Barry Dusharm grew up with boats, logging a lot of hours paddling and rowing. The passion for being on the water never left him, and when the obligations of a career and family allowed, he built a 17′ stitch-and-glue light dory and made a circumnavigation of sorts of northern New York State. He rowed south along Lake Champlain, west on the Erie Canal, trucked around Niagara Falls, and carried on rowing the southern shore of Lake Ontario. He descended 100 miles down the St. Lawrence, keeping to that river’s American shore until the Canadian border blocked his way. His wife Leslie did the driving for the half dozen legs of the trip, shuttling him back and forth as he juggled rowing and work.Barry had gone through some rough patches of water on Lake Ontario. Rowing an open boat in big waves worried him, and he began thinking about a kayak with watertight compartments that would keep him safe in bigger water. He didn’t want to give up rowing, the carrying capacity, and range of his dory, so he created a hybrid, combining the hull of a 21′ stitch-and-glue kayak hull with a cockpit for sliding-seat rowing with decks that created watertight storage compartments and housed foam flotation in both ends. With this new boat he took multi-week trips in the Florida Everglades, Arizona’s Lake Powell, and twice rowed Québec’s Manicouagan Reservoir, a circle of water 40 miles in diameter created by a meteor that smacked Canada 215 million years ago. For less ambitious outings he built a Wee Lassie canoe for himself to explore the waters in and around New York’s Adirondack Park.