‘We fought for every inch of water’: Utah student rowers who are visually impaired race 70 miles across Puget Sound

Emily Groves had been rowing for 50 miles through Puget Sound when things started to get difficult.

“I couldn’t see the big waves, so I wasn’t scared at all,” Groves told The Salt Lake Tribune. “I was calm and a little confused.”

Groves, who is blind, was part of a team of Utah students who are visually impaired that competed in SEVENTY48 last weekend. The race challenges participants to row, pedal or paddle — no motors or towing allowed — 70 miles from Tacoma to Port Townsend, Washington, across the Puget Sound in just 48 hours.

For added difficulty, the race started on June 10 at 7 p.m., so the first hours of rowing took place overnight.

The event is a worthy challenge for even the most experienced mariners; many teams never cross the finish line. A team of high school students organized by Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind stood out among the participants.

But early on the morning of June 12, the USDB team finished their 70-mile journey in just 36 hours — an accomplishment made even more special by the fact that another USDB team wasn’t able to finish the challenge in 2021.

“I feel like a lot of people don’t expect as much from me as other people,” Groves said. “When blind people do something cool, it’s all in the news because people always think that it’s extra hard or extra cool. And maybe from a theoretical standpoint, it is. But when you’re a blind person your whole life, you have no frame of reference, and you don’t think of it like that.”

‘My students could totally do that’

Ryan Greene, USDB’s director of campus programs for students who are blind, found out about SEVENTY48 from an outdoors podcast. He immediately thought, “My students could totally do that.”

Greene got a USDB team together to compete in SEVENTY48 last year, but at the 50-mile mark, 6-foot swells made it likely that their boat would capsize. They reluctantly pulled out of the race.

“Everyone was cheering for us last year, and then we didn’t make it, and it was heartbreaking,” said Ashton Hintze, a member of last year’s team who has Stargardt’s disease, a kind of juvenile macular degeneration that causes central vision loss. “I spent this entire year being like, ‘I need that redemption.’”

Greene felt the same. After getting approval from the Utah State Board of Education, the USDB superintendent and the USDB advisory council in August, he started getting the word out by planning training sessions. The team’s participation in the race was made possible by enrichment funds, which are specifically assigned to USDB for their extracurriculars and programming, so students did not have to pay to participate.

Soon, USDB had a crew of eight students from school districts across Utah. Eight students — four girls and four boys ages 14 to 19 — made up the final crew, as well as eight adult chaperones. Hintze and another student from the previous year’s team also joined.

Hintze, who just finished her first year at Snow College, began training for the race with renewed zeal. Greene scoured the internet for information on Puget Sound’s currents, depth, tides and seasonal weather conditions.

During their practice sessions on Lake Powell, the crew calculated their average rowing speed. They paddled overnight at Willard Bay to prepare for the race’s 7 p.m. start time. Soon, school was out, and race day loomed.

Groves remembers when the race started: Surrounded by other SEVENTY48 hopefuls, a cacophony of cheers and music swelling around her. The USDB team had wrapped their boat in LED lights and music boomed from their onboard speakers as they launched from Tacoma on the evening of Friday, June 10.

The team had acquired a 3D-printed map for Groves and another high-contrast map for the other students to get their bearings. By noon on Saturday, the team had made it to mile 50 — just 17 hours after starting. Compared to the previous year, Hintze and Greene felt like the team was flying. But that’s when conditions worsened.

‘We fought for every inch of water’

The team ventured into a part of the Puget Sound closer to the ocean and immediately felt the effects: unpredictable cross currents and stronger winds. While they had been consistently paddling 3 mph for the first 50 miles, they slowed to a pace of 2 mph, then one.

The tide was coming in against them, and they battled 4-foot swells before finally exiting the canal — with only 7 miles left to go in the race. But the wind and waves wouldn’t cease. Greene realized that there was no way the team would make it to Port Townsend that night.

The team made camp for the night and tried to get warm with HotHands hand warmers and hot meals courtesy of Jetboil stoves. The students nestled in their bivy sacks, conserving any scrap of warmth. Two students pulled out of the race that night.

“This was not a ‘gimme,’” Greene said. “Nobody was like, ‘Oh, it’s the poor blind kids, we’re going to make it easy for them.’ They’re very used to that, and they hate that. It did not feel like that at all. It felt like we fought for every inch of water.”

Greene debated beginning to row again at 2 a.m., but knew the team needed rest, and decided to wait until 6 a.m. to start up again. And as the sun dawned on Sunday morning, the water was glass.

The two students who had pulled out of the race the previous night rejoined the USDB team as they crossed the finish line, coming in 71st place.

“It was such a relief,” Hintze said. “I put so much work in, and sitting there thinking about it in the moments when it was getting dangerous and we thought we wouldn’t make it for a second time, I was like, ‘no way.’ But when we were a mile away and you could see the land and the people, it felt amazing.”

“It just proved that we can do things that not even normal people would want to do,” Hintze continued. “I would hope there’s more opportunities to do things like this. There’s always room to grow there.”