Taking to the water

Bob Handelman

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For three weeks each fall, Yale rowers pile onto buses that leave campus at 6 a.m. most days for early morning practices on the Housatonic River. Five men’s heavyweight crew boats, including the one pictured here, are on the water by 6:45, and the rowers are headed back to campus by 8:30. “It’s a special opportunity from my perspective,” says crew operations coordinator Joel Furtek ’90, coxswain for the 1990 lightweight crew that won a national championship. “We’re out before the rest of the campus has woken up,” adds Furtek. “The water is dead flat. There is just the beauty of the boat slicing through the stillness.”