History

The Santa Cruz Rowing Club was started by a small group of rowing enthusiasts around 1975 and formalized in 1985. In the 1980’s, one of the main projects for the Club was working with the Santa Cruz Harbor in providing proper facilities for rowing. This project resulted in one of the best facilities in California for open water rowing. The Santa Cruz Rowing Club facility is located under the Murray Street bridge on the West side of the lower Santa Cruz Harbor. In 1994, the club became a non-profit corporation and this has allowed us to expand our focus. One of our goals for the 1990’s was to provide structured instruction so that we can introduce the fun of rowing to interested members of the community. This, very naturally, lead to a second major goal for the 90’s: To expand our "fleet" so that members can enjoy rowing without having to own a rowing shell.Now the Santa Cruz Rowing Club owns 16 open-water rowing shells for use by members. SCRC members participate in many of the open water races in Northern California and beyond. We also have regular rowing tours for those who would like to explore diverse waterways from a rowing shell. Our excellent instructors are available to teach rowing to anyone willing to take the time to learn. 

HISTORY OF RECREATIONAL ROWING IN SANTA CRUZ

Our modern day Rowing Club was preceded by a small group of independent rowers in the mid 1970’s. The only rowing craft available were big and heavy. The always stable fiberglass triples at that time weighed 350 pounds. We had a lot of fun both racing then across the Bay and partying on them. (continued below photos)

Credit for advancing the sport goes to Lee Faraola, a former merchant marine. He would opportunistically buy and then re-sell boats to others in order to expand the family of rowers in our community. Over time, there were up to a dozen of these heavy doubles and triples side-tied around the edge of the harbor.  By the mid-1980’s there were enough rowers here that we started to look for a central location to dock our boats

We realized that if we could work together, we might be able to convince the Santa Cruz Harbor District to dedicate a spot for rowing and consequently we would then have a stronger voice to assure rowing was a harbor asset, rather than just a boat here and there. While it took many years to put all the pieces together, the Harbor finally concluded that building us a rowing dock providing rental spaces for 100 human powered boats (mostly rowing shells but also SUP’s, outriggers, kayaks etc) would financially make sense. The Harbor District replaced four sailboat slips and gave us a home base.

The Santa Cruz Rowing Dock was dedicated in November 1992 and was named in honor of Lee Faraola and Joe Weiss, the two men who had taken heavy boat rowing from a casual outing to a cast of rower characters using all types of rowing boats – from the heavy triples to sleek Maas rowing shells. The Club had arrived!

By the way, our rowing dock is one of the finest around – when rowers come from San Francisco, Sausalito and even Los Angeles, they remark how great it is that our boats are located just a jet float away from the water. At those other clubs, rowers have to carry boats from racks, across parking lots, down gangplanks, to reach the jet float. We get to just “push” our boats across the jet float and off we go.

While “modern” carbon fiber shells became the norm in the late 80’s, these heavy triples hung on and were last used as beginner boats by the  UCSC rowing program. UCSC’s boats are now our adjacent neighbor on the dock.

The Fukashima Tsunami in 2011 caused a lot of damage in the Santa Cruz Harbor. The jet floats were torn from the dock, giving the remaining heavy triples one last wild ride up and down the harbor till the long trail of jet float got tangled up and it sank along with the rowboats.

Our Rowing Facilities

The Santa Cruz Harbor District owns and manages all the facilities that support our rowing fun. The District built the rowing dock, jet float and rowing racks in 1991. We each pay for the use of a rowing rack, either individually by private boat owners, or by the Club, who rents racks for the Club owned boats that we rent out to qualified rowers.

 The little Oar Locker located adjacent to the rowing dock was built by long time rower Mike Thompson, and was driven from his back yard on 9th Avenue to the dock in the back of Linda Locklin’s Saab (oh why didn’t we take any photos of that Oar Locker sticking out way too many feet past the car bumper as they drove so carefully across the Murray Street Bridge?).

 The larger Oar House was built by the Harbor and was dedicated to Russ Cline in 2000. Russ was a long time rower and mentor to many rowers, and one of our Club boats, Russ Cline II, is dedicated to Russ.

The outside wall of the Oar House proudly shows off the sport of rowing, with two crossed wooden oars bolted to the side, crafted and installed by two long time wooden boat rowers Joel and Bill.