July 6, 2000
At the end of a four-and-a-half-day 134-mile row spanning the East River and Gardiner’s Bay in 17-foot-long, double-ended open water skiffs, John Mullen and Louis Mackall, 58-year-old Yale-trained architects, were, though weary, buoyed by the experience.
The veteran oarsmen — Mullen, a Texan who summers in Springs, is a masters champion — had rowed around Gardiner’s Island and Shelter Island in the past, but had never attempted anything like the 30-mile, seven-and-a-half-hour legs their most recent adventure along the length of Long Island’s North Shore had required.
. . . The party of five, which included Bill Lenderking, a Shelter Islander, David Stookey, the editor of Open Water Rowing magazine, and Tom Luckey, a sculptor, set out from the South Street Seaport in New York City the morning of Monday, June 26. . . . By day’s end they had fetched Bayville and the Tides Motor Lodge there. They spent the night of the second day at the Mount Sinai Yacht Club, just to the east of Port Jefferson, a harbor they eschewed because of its two-mile-long inlet and large ferry wakes, and, at the end of the 24-mile third leg, put into Mattituck’s Matt-A-Mar marina.
. . . To people who ask him why in the world he would want to row from Manhattan to the Hamptons, Mullen replies, “It’s much more pleasant than the L.I.E., and, actually, it may be faster!”
. . . When Mullen said, with a smile, that he had for a long time collected books about oceanic and coastal rowing feats, Mackall said to his friend’s wife, Anne, “Please tell him I’m not going to row across the ocean with him.”
His interest, said Mullen, was “totally vicarious, totally vicarious . . . but it’s a great collection of books.”
“Actually,” he continued, “there’s no better row than around Gardiner’s Island. And you can do it in four hours — very comfortably in five. There’s such a variety of scenery. We’re so blessed here.”
—
Bruno (Whitey) Tiska, a Bridgehampton farmer who sold the land for the front nine to the founders of the South Fork Country Club in the 1950s, was accorded the honor of teeing off first at the Amagansett course’s back nine ribbon-cutting ceremony Saturday. Ron Delsener won the lottery to play in the first foursome with Gil Hanse, the back nine’s architect, Larry Cantwell, and Pat Bistrian Jr.
