HAVERHILL — Splash, whoosh, click.
Splash, whoosh, click.
Two rowers slide back and forth in the middle of their long skinny boats, gliding over the Merrimack River.
It’s an eye-catching scene.
Iconic too, in that it’s immortalized by American artist Thomas Eakins in his 1871 oil painting “Max Schmitt in a Single Scull,” which depicts his friend on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia.
Rowing the single scull, a pleasant and lonely endeavor deeply rooted in this region, endures in competitions and as a niche activity on the Merrimack.
Here, on a late spring afternoon, each rower works a pair of oars spread wide in oarlocks suspended off the gunwales by riggers.
The scullers propel themselves upriver on the surface’s broken image of reflected clouds and blue sky.
They ride over the tidal river, pushing and pulling, Paul Geoghegan, 67, of Merrimac, in a blue scull, and Rick Bayko, 76, of West Newbury, in a white one.
They belong to the Merrimack Tidal Rowers Association, a small group which stows its boats, known as sculls or shells, in garage-like bays here at Marianna’s Marina in Haverhill.
It’s downriver from Haverhill’s Basiliere Bridge and upriver from West Newbury. The Groveland Pines Recreation Area lay on a rise directly across the water.
Years ago, race cars roared there at the Pines Speedway on Saturday nights. If the wind was right, people downriver in West Newbury could hear the engines.
Geoghegan and Bayko, former track athletes, row together once or twice a week.
Both like the exercise, peace and solitude that rowing brings.
“What’s really neat is when you come here on an early Sunday morning and it is completely flat,” Geoghegan says. “There is a little bit of fog on the water and it starts to lift a little bit.”
Bayko, who was a fine-tuned distance runner for much of his life, recalls trying his hand at rowing once when he was in college in Boston.
He climbed in a training wherry (a light rowboat) on the Charles River and couldn’t keep the boat straight.
Storrow Drive was on one side and Memorial Drive in Cambridge on the other. Despite all the Boston traffic and noise, and the frustration built from not keeping the boat steady, he was impressed and surprised by how peaceful it was on the water.
Association members row when they please, each with a key to the storage bays where the lightweight sculls rest on racks.
A main draw for the single scull rowers, as well kayakers and canoeists, is getting away for a few hours, retreating to the river.
“Rowers are solitary,” Geoghegan says. “They like to get together — then go apart.”
He and Bayko share a few words before they head to the boat launch – a few more at the turnaround spot on the river.
Right now, as they row, each of them likely has a distinct interior experience.
Bayko is counting his strokes, checking his time, engaged in a challenge.
“I enjoy going real fast and hard and feeling that this is well within me,” he says.
He’ll feel a sense of accomplishment when he’s done.
Geoghegan likes to get in a workout and look around.
Moments after he arrived at the marina this afternoon he saw a bald eagle flying upriver.
Osprey and kingfishers are regulars on the Merrimack.
One day, an endangered species almost joined him in his scull.
“I pull a stroke,” he says. “I look over my shoulder and I see a sturgeon in the air.”
The big prehistoric-looking fish splashed down so close to the boat that Geoghegan got wet. The short-nose sturgeon spawns in Haverhill.
Rowing has a storied history, the sport evolving from warfare, fishing and transportation.
The first modern races stem from water taxis ferrying customers, the rowers striving to be first across the Thames River in London, England, Bayko says.
Some of the first inter-high school and inter-collegiate athletic events in the 19th century involved rowing.
Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, and Phillips Academy Andover in Andover competed, as did Harvard and Yale crew teams.
The upcoming Olympics Games Paris 2024, which will run from July 26 to Aug. 11, will include single, double, and quadruple sculling (a rower operates two oars), and pair, four and eight sweeping (the rowers hand a single oar) events, all at 2,000 meters (1.2 miles).
Rowing remains popular with youth who compete on high school and college teams, but they typically drift away from it in young adulthood.
Now, with an aging population — some 20% of Americans are 65 and older — some of the erstwhile rowers return to rowing, men and women.
Other rowers, Geoghegan and Bayko among them, discover and take up the activity later in life.
Sculling engages all the muscle groups and is a fluid continuous movement, a strength and cardio exercise without abrupt stops and starts, putting less stress on knees and ankles.
Geoghegan and Bayko started with indoor rowing on machines about 20 years ago.
Geoghegan, a longtime skier, was tired of being sore after teaching skiing.
He started indoor rowing to get in shape for skiing. Then he discovered outdoor rowing.
Bayko’s body had taken a pounding from running thousands of miles.
He fell in love with cross-country running at Newburyport High, Class of ‘65. After serving in the U.S. Army, he ran competitively in college, qualifying for the Olympic trials twice. He finished in the top 20 at the Boston Marathon four years in a row in the 1970s.
Besieged by injuries, he took up indoor rowing at age 52 and held the world record for his age group at 57.
Upriver, another rowing organization in Lowell named the Merrimac River Rowing Association, hosts the Textile River Regatta in the fall.
The Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston draws thousands of competitors from around the world over three days in October, where rowers race for the best time.
Meanwhile, the Haverhill rowers get on the water throughout the year.
“The river is always different, a different light,” Geoghegan says.
For more information on the club, contact Paul Geoghegan at merrimackrowers@gmail.com.
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