Spring Wave 2017
On Saturday May 20th the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum held its annual spring youth rowing race at Button Bay State Park. On a clear, brisk, blustery, spring day one-hundred and sixty youth comprising 24 crews raced their hearts out. Crews from nine Chittenden and Addison County Schools as well as Connecticut, Maine and New York competed in two combined time heats totaling 1 ¾ miles. LCMM has always ended youth races with a final heat called the “mess-about” in which all the crews are mixed up randomly. It is a unique opportunity to test rower’s ability to adapt and be flexible in a competitive environment. All of the six-oar boats used in this competition were built at LCMM in the youth boat building program. The four-oar boats were built by “Floating the Apple” in New York City and are on loan to LCMM.
Click here for full race results.
Longboat Launch Day
On Thursday morning, May 25th, we launched the seventeenth boat built by Champlain Longboats in partnership with the Diversified Occupations Program of the Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center.
Nine students from three local schools worked at LCMM’s Boatshop since January to complete “Mad Martha,” who will soon depart to spend her
life with Massachusetts Bay Open Water Rowing in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Several other Champlain Longboats have also “gone abroad” – five to the Hull Lifesaving Museum, one to Gloucester Rowing Club, and one to the United States Navy USS Constitution rowing team.
LCMM currently maintains a fleet of 18 rowing boats on Lake Champlain that serves over 600 students and
200 adults each season through school and community rowing programs throughout the Champlain Valley. In addition to a dozen Longboats built by students at LCMM, the Museum fleet now includes four boats from other schools and community groups in Vermont, and two “visitors” from Floating the Apple, a youth rowing program based in New York City.