Adrienne Tanner is a Vancouver journalist who writes about civic affairs.
For 116 years the Vancouver Rowing Club and Royal Vancouver Yacht Club have been neighbours, sharing an idyllic pocket of Coal Harbour at the southeast corner of Stanley Park. By Vancouver standards, that’s an eternity – a relationship almost as old as the city itself.
On pleasant evenings, as many as 50 rowers train alongside professional tour boats and dinner cruises and private pleasure craft. To come and go, they must navigate a channel that is 91-metres wide at its narrowest point which has its challenges, but mostly happens without incident.
Now, renovation plans by the yacht club proposing to add more berths for its members which means pushing the marina even further into the channel and narrowing it, has soured relations between the two clubs. With no compromise currently tenable, at least not to the yacht club, it now falls to the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority to adjudicate. We can only hope cooler heads there will find middle ground that restores goodwill before it permanently washes away.
The yacht club renovation is overdue and includes removing wooden posts treated with creosote which is toxic to fish. To pay for the job and keep costs down for existing members – most of whom are not, contrary to popular belief, wildly wealthy – the club wants to raise money by adding 47 more berths.
There are currently 300 members on a waiting list for moorage at the club, says Ron Jupp, a yacht club member working on the marina renewal project. Adding berths requires space and the current plan calls to reduce the width of the entire channel to 71 metres.
The rowing club says a channel of that width poses a significant danger to rowers, some of whom are amateurs and need a bigger buffer to stay safe. Individual rowers would still be able to go out in boats, says Dimas Craveiro, a past president and captain of the rowing club. But it would spell the death of the club’s mainstay training programs where boats go out side-by-side. Rowing Canada and Rowing BC echo the Vancouver club’s concerns.
The rowing club has proposed a compromise that would result in a slightly wider channel, but would mean the loss of 12 new berths for the yacht club. But Mr. Jupp says the yacht club won’t budge because it needs the revenue.
Current boating rules prohibit rowing in Coal Harbour, but the port authority has always turned a blind eye, Mr. Jupp says. He believes the yacht club’s channel traffic plan will cement the rowers’ rights to the water and work for both sides.
One senses there is more than just channel width fuelling this stalemate. There is a philosophical rift between people who enjoy self-propelled sports and those who thrill to the thrum of a motor. Similar animosities play out between backcountry skiers and snowmobilers, mountain bikers and quad riders. And if the motor-loving crowd are to delicate ears, deafeningly loud and occasionally boorish, the self-propelled purists can sound annoyingly sanctimonious.
The rowing club website dumps on big yachts for polluting and being inaccessible to the public. Mr. Craveiro derides novice boaters who roar out of the marina with one hand on the rudder and the other wrapped around a drink.
In this case, the clash seems exacerbated by money – yacht owners are often assumed to be universally wealthy. The rowing club is a non-profit that promotes amateur sport and is the far more affordable of the two. It chides the yacht club for failing to “pass the true cost of moorage to yacht owners.” Yacht club members are being asked to pay handsomely for one of the proposed new berths. They start at $150,000 – but that money covers about 10 years of moorage.
Mr. Jupp’s yacht was built in 1943 and is not a luxury craft. Similarly, rowers aren’t universally poor: The modern version of the sport has patrician roots in Britain’s upper-class colleges and some Vancouver members row their way to university scholarships.
The reality is, both yachting and rowing are niche pursuits that must share public waterways.
If the port chooses the rowing club’s compromise, which seems reasonable, it would be charitable for the rowers to dial back the anti-yacht rhetoric. If they can’t be friends, they should at least try to stay good neighbours.