Washington Canoe Club
On Dec. 4, Chris Brown of the Washington Canoe Club gave a richly illustrated lecture to 41 of us gathered on the CCA’s first membership meeting using the club’s new Zoom account. The WCC, with its boathouse just upstream from the current Key Bridge since 1909, has had an existence rich in fellowship, competition, and self-help. Chris recounted the club’s surviving destructive ice floes, floods, and fires; its three-mile swimming races down from Chain Bridge; winning Olympic medals' and a next-door livery renting out 800 canoes. WCC athletes primarily focus on flatwater paddling in kayaks, high-kneel canoes, and outrigger canoes. In the 1950s several adventurous members of WCC began whitewater paddling on the Potomac and nearby streams. This enthusiasm led them to partner with the Sycamore Island Club to organize the first Downriver Race in 1956 through Mather Gorge. The same organizers gathered afterward to form the CCA.
Jen Sass managed the presentation, yet another CCA success in working around the COVID pandemic: first the Potomac Downriver Race shifted to a self-timing format, and now we have innovated this kind of annual membership meeting. Watch to see how the new CCA Board pulls off the virtual edition of the club's next big undertaking—April’s Alice Ferguson River Cleanup.
Copies of Chris' book may be bought from the Washington Canoe Club—and if you purchase it there rather than on Amazon, proceeds will be donated to boathouse restoration efforts.
West Virginia Rivers Coalition
At the Jan. 11 members’ meeting, WVRC Director Angie Rosser took advantage of one of COVID’s few bright sides, telling 35 CCA members and guests via Zoom from the fastness of her own home about her Charleston-based conservation organization. Over its 31 years, WVRC has spoken many times to a CCA audience, but never with such ease. Focusing on water quality, Angie said, “We all live downstream,” and spoke of the conundrum of people’s livelihoods in the Mountain State being so wrapped up in the extractive industries. Kathleen Sengstock and Jen Sass in particular, pointed to the error of leaving people out of the interlocking environmental issues and the hopes for the Biden administration.
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