Rowing on Lake Nahuel Huapi

I couldn’t believe it! The view through the hotel's plate glass window was spectacular enough: the flat acquamarine waters of Bariloche's Lake Nahuel Huapi, the plush pine shore and rounded foothills of the Andes beyond. But what had caught my eye was a sleek rowing shell slicing through the water in the foreground.

My gasp startled Florencia, who was in the process of checking me in. “Rema acqua?” I managed to ask, in a voice that probably showed my excitement. You can row here?

“Por supuesto, hay un club de remo a 500 metros del hotel. Quizas alquilen barquos”, there was a club just down the road that might rent out boats.

Forty-five minutes later, I was standing in the boat house with Marcos, a former Chilean National Team rower and the fulltime coach / administrator of Bariloche’s Club de Regattas. A few sleek fibreglass singles, some doubles and a rather battered eight sat on racks. But most of the boats were what my crewmate Fenwick calls ‘pot roasts’: broad, stable, fibre glass rowing shells with heavy wooden oars. I couldn’t convince Marcos to let me take out one of the racing shells, but I was welcome to use one of the pot roasts, he said.

The bay in front of the clubhouse was stunning – deep blue water, a rough granite shoreline and intense green pines mixed with hundred-year-old cedars. It reminded me very much of my own ‘home’ landscape on the Canadian shield – right down to the rustic wooden cottages. However, beyond the shoreline, steep granite mountains rose to the blue sky – the leading edge of the Andean cordillera.

I rowed along the rocky shore, enjoying the familiar pressure of blade against water and the smooth slice of the boat. I tried to focus on technique, but my eyes kept straying to the scenery, and I stopped several times to take photographs. Had I been rowing a regular shell, both I and my camera would probably be 400 meters down at the bottom of a frigid Andean lake.

It’s often the unexpected that is the most special. I had never planned to row in Patagonia. But the fates intervened, and found me a hotel next to a rowing club, and a Chilean coach willing to send me out in a boat that perfectly suited my needs.

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