The Potomac River was running swift and high Saturday morning as a multi-colored flotilla of 55 kayaks, canoes and stand-up paddle boards bobbed in a giant eddy just below Great Falls.
The paddlers ranged in age from 7 to at least 75 and included a few ringers from the national and world championship circuits. They chatted, took selfies and traded mock-competitive smack talk while waiting for the 70th start of an annual tradition that has occurred every May as reliably as the flow of the river itself: the Potomac Downriver Race.
Kayakers Patrick Khaghani, 25, of Bethesda and Mark Burns, 48, of Cabin John were eager to rekindle their rivalry. Last time they raced, Burns finished ahead. “It’s hit or miss as to who’s going to take first, who’s going to take second,” Khaghani said.
Burns was accompanied by his son, Kieran, 15, in a red kayak like his dad’s. He said he hopes the boy beats him in a race someday — maybe it would be Saturday – “then I’ll know my job is done.”
“I’m getting closer every year,” Kieran said.
The event was founded in 1956 by local canoe enthusiasts to show off the marvel of such a endlessly recreational river so close to the nation’s capital. “We’ve got one of the best waterways for paddling really anywhere in the country,” said Jim Ross, president of the Washington Canoe Club, whose members co-founded the race with members of the Sycamore Island Club. Olympic canoeists Frank and Bill Havens won that first race paddling a wooden canvas-covered canoe.
Ross, 63, was competing solo in a canoe he had built himself, using an old-school one-knee paddling stance. His son Gavin, 29, a coach at the canoe club and former member of the U.S. national team, decided to add a degree of difficulty by soloing in an off-the-shelf, non-racing, Old Town family canoe. “This is by far the hardest, most inconvenient, dumbest way to do this race,” Gavin said. “Nobody else in the country high-kneels boats like this. This is just our family’s way of doing it.”
Despite the presence of expert competitors since the beginning, the race is designed to reflect another rare quality of the Potomac – water suited to a wide range of abilities, from wild rapids to lake-like tranquility, said race director Risa Shimoda with the Canoe Cruisers Association of Greater Washington, D.C., a kayak and canoe club that puts on the race and offers year-round paddling programs. The 7.5-mile whitewater course starts at the mouth of a side channel roughly parallel with the beginning of the Billy Goat Trail in Great Falls Park and ends at Sycamore Island just downriver from Glen Echo. Racers need experience to handle Class III rapids and endurance for long pulls through nearly still water.
John Mein, 45, of Potomac paddled the race in high school in the mid-1990s. On Saturday, he was with his 7-year-old son, Luca, in a tandem closed canoe. It’s “great paddling the race 30 years later with Luca,” he said.
Julie Mackel, 43, of Spencerville said she fondly remembers her mother taking her canoeing as a girl on a calmer part of the river. On race day she was competing for the third time in a tandem canoe with her brother, Ryan Boslego, 45, of Rockville. “We just do it for fun,” Mackel said.
“There’s just so many different people that you wouldn’t normally paddle with,” noted kayaker Grace Hassler, 29, of Potomac. “So many different kinds of boats that you don’t normally get to see.”
David Whiteis, 63, was one of the four intrepid stand-up paddle-boarders. “It’s much more fun,” he declared.
The race
Finally, it was race time. The sun had dispatched the early morning chill from the steep gorge. One of the organizers stood on a rock in the middle of the eddy and blew the starting whistle. Off went the paddlers in a mass scramble.
Some bolder boaters sprinted for the main channel where the fast water stacked up in unruly standing waves. Others chose to skirt left. Mather Gorge lay ahead, where the rapids have names such as Wet Bottom. Farther on were Yellow Falls and Calico Rapids.
Down river, the finish line was marked by a rope strung from Sycamore Island to the mainland. Nearly an hour after the race started, a lone figure in a red kayak appeared in the distance. It was Khaghani, stroking powerfully to win with a time of 54:32. About 90 seconds later came his friendly rival Burns. “When I was going under the American Legion Bridge, I looked back and saw my lead and I said, ‘I’m not going to let him catch’ ” up, Khaghani said when the pair got to shore.
The first canoe, finishing third overall and a minute behind Burns, was paddled by Jonah Goldman, 32, from the Great Falls, Maryland, area, and Tyler Westfall, 29, of Germantown. It was Goldman’s first race while Westfall has more experience as a member of the U.S. national slalom kayaking team. The pair had taken on water after hitting a big wave and had been forced to bail as they paddled. “This was awesome,” Goldman said.
Not far behind was Gavin Ross, in fifth place, who kept pace with the duo despite paddling his canoe solo. “Gavin, you were killing it,” Goldman told him. Ross nodded at the next finisher – his father, Jim Ross – and said, “I should have been a little bit further ahead of him.”
Kieran Burns crossed the finish line in seventh place, catching up a bit more on his dad’s finishing time than he had in last year’s race.
The youngest racer – Luca Mein, paddling with his father – and one of the oldest, Anne Kibler, 75, steering a solo kayak, finished within two minutes of each other, in 30th and 32nd place, respectively. It was the first race for both. Kibler, from College Park, joked, “I don’t know if I have another one in me.”
But as she deftly shouldered her kayak before carrying it up the steep bank to the parking lot, waving off all offers of assistance, it seemed that she just might.
