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I rowed crew for years and sculled as well; single sculls are so low and lightweight and long and pointy that non-crew people often mistake them for kayaks (except the oars are all wrong!). Seldom canoes, that is just too weird, and “rowboat” implies something a lot roomier and less likely to tip over. It is VERY easy to overturn a single scull; all you have to do is get one oar stuck in the water at the release (when you finish the power part of the stroke and your hands are heading down your body toward your lap) and you are spitting out harbor or river water someplace unsanitary! Nobody I knew while sculling carried a “waterproof pouch with a cell phone.” For one thing, you’re in the middle of fairly strenuous exercise and should not be taking phone calls, for another, in water of that temperature if you go over you had better be either swimming or getting help from people who are on the river near you RIGHT NOW or you will be hypothermic in less than half an hour – actual number depends on your metabolic rate and your bodyfat percentage.

And please, don’t even think about trying to do CPR from a single scull!!! There would then be TWO bodies in the water.

Helen Johnstone was a sailboat racer, not a sculler. The Johnstones build JBoats, racing sailboats. Even though Choate has crew, Helen was not in crew but sailing. So please stop with the whacked conspiracy theories. She sounds like she would have been a cool person to know, and I love that her family has started a memorial (SAILING) regatta for her, but aside from the excellent fact that Lynda Carter is doing such a demanding sport at her age, there’s just no “there” there.

Finally, you certainly don’t try attacking anyone from a single scull! Try standing up even in a one-person kayak and waving your paddle around — now, shrink the width of the kayak down to 18 inches and make balancing on the outrigger-mounted oars integral to maintaining an upright boat, and what exactly are you going to use to attack anyone with??? Defense marks, my butt. If Helen slipped off a hiking trail she might have marks from trying to grab at rocks and shrubs on the way down — I have climbed around Carderock (slightly up the Potomac from DC), and there are plenty of park areas, including sections of recreational trail, that are RIGHT next to the Potomac all the way into the city, it’s a “greenbelt” thing, designed to sort of protect the watershed, for the little good it manages to do. If she jumped from a bridge, I have no idea where the “slight injuries” came from. As for the car keys and the silver bracelet watch, those do not sound like things I’d take rowing, “Huh,” I would leave anything that might be damaged by water in my locker at the boathouse, wouldn’t you? But whatever caused the “slight injuries,” it wasn’t a crazed AARP-qualified Wonder Woman with superhuman balance bashing at her with an eight-foot-long, four-pound sculling oar which she would have needed in the oarlock to keep her boat from going right over. Sigh.

Anyway, thanks for the details, I was wondering what had happened to Helen, and this was one of the sites with the most info.

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…..when the medics or divers arrived they performed CPR. That gives you an idea that they thought there was actually a chance to save this person. That means she had JUST died before being discovered. Ms. Johnstone also had forms of defense wounds on her. Why didn’t Carter try any form of CPR or bringing this person ashore? Instead she sat around waiting simply to point out the body?! Sounds like Vermont?

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may she rest in peace.

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http://tooconservative.com/?p=2005

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