Getting to Know Hatchets Rowing Centre
To honour the history, dedication and current initiatives of each rowing community, Row Ontario will be producing a series of profiles on member clubs across Ontario. Today we get to know more about the Hatchets Rowing Centre!
Club founder’s Kathy McCarthy and Jeremy Fowler established Hatchets Rowing Centire in 2009 after meeting and rowing together at the Barrie Rowing Club. Fowler had a cottage in the Muskoka area and knew the waterways well enough to know that a rowing club had a chance to be successful in the area.
“I think if people are looking for a vacation and somewhere to row, it’s a pretty nice spot,” said Fowler, who is also the current President of Hatchets Rowing Centre. “This area didn’t have a rowing club when we founded it so we thought it would be great spot to set one up. The body of water we row on is pretty awesome.”
For the first two years of the club’s existence, Hatchets Rowing was based in Minett, Ont., at a marina site on Lake Rosseau. In September of 2011, the club packed up and moved about a 15-minute drive southeast to Port Carling and into a building that was previously used as a boat building shop. The new location was a big improvement to the club’s infrastructure, with one of the boat slips being about 20-feet wide and 40-feet long, and having a boathouse right on the water.
“The boathouse is on the Indian River, which joins Lake Rosseau to Lake Muskoka,” said McCarthy. “We’re located on the south side of the lock, and we have about a three kilometre stretch of river to row on, but we can actually row much further than that. We go out into Lake Muskoka pretty often, it has super clean waters and in the morning there’s not a ton of other boat traffic. We’re pretty lucky that we can row for hundreds of kilometres in any direction from the club.”
The club typically operates between May and August each year with July and August being the busiest months. One of the reasons the summer months are the busiest has to do with the population in and around Port Carling. There are about 6,000 year-round residents in the area, but in the summertime the population balloons to around 40,000. The club draws a lot of their rowers from the seasonal cottagers, who come from all over including the Toronto area, Niagara, Collingwood, the United States, and even as far away as Switzerland. There are some rowers who drive in from as far away as Parry Sound, Haliburton and Bracebridge, which is about an hour’s drive for weekly sessions at the club.
Given its location and seasonal nature, Hatchets Rowing Centre isn’t a typical rowing club, and its programming and structure reflects that. Approximately 300 rowers will come through the club each year and the club is set up so the rowers can drop in any time they want, with a single use fee for every time they row. With the vast majority of the club’s rowers being seasonal residents, flexibility in their membership model is a key to the club’s success. The rowers also have the option of signing up for private lessons or joining one of Hatchet’s programs. For those wishing to compete in a more typical nature, competing in the Ontario circuit of regattas, Hatchets Training Centre (Hatchets Rowing Centre’s partner organization), offers the ability to do just that.
“We have rowing programs every day in the summer until noon,” said McCarthy. “We have our junior scullers program which is kids from eight years old all the way to high school. And then we have an adult fitness program, which is for anyone who is just looking to row for fitness, not in a competitive sense. We also run competitive programs for both high school and masters. We teach everybody to row in singles as well, with a maximum of four people at a time. Once programs are running there’s usually 6-8 people per session so we’ll have one coach for every six people or so.”
In addition to their daily programming, the club runs learn-to-row programs as well. Fowler and McCarthy are quick to mention that the two other coaches at the club, Lily Baker and Graham Yates-Krull, have been a big part of running the club’s programming and operations over the last few years. Baker began rowing at the club when she was 12 years old and now manages the club in the summer. Yates-Krull has coached at the club for last two years and has been a big contributor.
The club focuses on sculling and has a fleet of mostly singles which are used every day, along with a couple of doubles and a quad that get used occasionally. In addition to the programs that they run each year, the club has participated in several different rowing activities in the past. They have run different types of regattas as well as weekly afternoon long rows, which attracted members from surrounding clubs to come to Port Carling for the day to participate. The participants would often row to resorts or a friend’s cottage on one of the surrounding lakes to stop for lunch before returning. Outside of rowing, the club has also gotten into log rolling and an adjoining business sells different open water shells that are built in different parts of Ontario. This year, the club is planning to combine several of their activities into one weekend of events.
“This year we’re planning on combining everything into one weekend in August,” said McCarthy. “Some people can’t make it every weekend, so instead for separating some things out, we’re planning on doing a 22km long row race on the Saturday morning, and we’ll also have a local internal regatta that we’ll also run that morning, and then do a brunch on Sunday and another long recreational row on Sunday afternoon. We might also put a log rolling competition into the mix on that weekend as well. We think it’s a fun idea to turn it into a whole weekend, I think if people are driving all the way up here, they may want to spend the night and stay for a couple of days.”
Hatchets Rowing Centre celebrated their tenth anniversary at their current location in September and show no signs of slowing down. Look for them to be a fixture in the Muskoka region for many years to come.
Thank you to Kathy McCarthy and Jeremy Fowler for their generous contributions and help in completing this profile. Photos are property of Hatchets Rowing Centre.
