Their Best Days Are Now

摘要

In 1915, so the story goes, a pair of skilled San Francisco cable-car carpenters built a fast rowboat called VIKING, and 15 years later one of them donated it to the city's Dolphin Rowing Club. It's a pretty boat, bearing a passing resemblance to a Whitehall pulling boat, but it's lower, lighter, narrower, and thus faster than the Whitehall. It also proved to be faster than many of its contemporary peers nearly five decades after the boat came to the club when, in 1977, it outpaced its rivals in a race on the Bay. That race was organized by a boatbuilder named Gordie Nash who, awestruck at the boat's performance, began building copies of it in fiberglass. This gave rise to a request for a new wooden Viking, and the design's legend was made. We learn these things in Abner Kingman's article beginning on page 52. We learn of how a young builder named Jeremy Fisher-Smith began his boatbuilding career with that first VIKING replica in 1978, and of how he built two more copies of the boat after that-and rebuilt the original VIKING. And we learn of how Fisher-Smith later met the demand for a single-rower version of the boat, an example of which appears on the cover of this magazine.