Mike Drew – Looking and Learning
Mike Drew tells a story about the river that helped shape his life. At 17, already a couple of years into an apprenticeship as a cabinet-maker, he built a 16 ft motor boat. He found a mooring for it on the river off Exmouth and needed to use a dinghy to get out to his new pride and joy. Then, one day, a friend invited him over to his own boat on an upriver mooring off Starcross. To his friend’s astonishment, Mike made it in his dinghy against a fast-ebbing tide. “How on earth did you do that?” the friend asked. “Easy”, Mike replied. “You row by yourself on this river and you have to look, you have to learn, and in the end you get to know all the little ways the river can help you…even against a tide like this.”
This sense of the river as a living thing, a creature of the weather and the wind, a body of water in constant flux as sandbanks and tidal channels form and re-form, is something that has remained a constant fascination. Take a snapshot at any point over Mike’s long and busy life and there will be tiny changes as the water nibbles deeper into Bull Hill, or the Warren tightens its chokehold on the estuary narrows, or the pattern of navigation buoys – chasing the pulse of the river – are moved yet again. A river this elusive, and this beautiful, can be seductive – dangerous company for novice sailors and rowers – and Mike is in no doubt that looking and learning should be inscribed on every rower’s heart. Good advice from someone who – in his late sixties – was still the man to beat in competitive outings in the single scull.
Now in his eighties, Mike has always lived by the water. By the age of ten, along with his mates, he was helping Budleigh fishermen cast their drift nets off the beach. This involved rowing the heavy clinker-built boats in a long semi-circle from the foreshore, dragging the net behind until the fishermen could haul it in. On a good day Mike would arrive home with a couple of fresh mackerel. There must have been lots of good days because now he can’t stand eating the fish, but the longer-term reward was a knowledge, almost a kinship, with the sea.
Next came water-skiing. A club had started at Exmouth. Mike joined – and promptly built a speedboat. In those long-ago days the Warren was smaller but immensely popular with weekenders from upriver. Mike remembers dozens of boats lining the beach and the overwhelming scent from the drifts of yellow lupins that pressed down towards the sand. “With the wind in the west” he says, “You could smell those lupins from across the river.”
There are other little snapshots from those days, eternally fascinating, and one of them is the Ten Buoy in the deep-water channel opposite the club’s current clubhouse. “That buoy marks a ledge of seabed rocks called the Checkstone and it was actually painted in red and white check. Nowadays, of course, with all the regulations you can’t do things like that. Shame, really.”
Water-skiing, as it turned out, demanded driver skills that Mike later turned to good account as cox in a rowing quad. “If you’re at the wheel in the speedboat then you have to be so aware of what the water’s doing. You’re just concentrating so hard, juggling the throttle, anticipating the next wave, trying to keep the boat level and straight, trying to drive the straightest line between the buoys. Lose that concentration for a moment and you’re all over the place.” Quite.
Mike first learned about the newly formed Exmouth Rowing Club from a mention in the local paper. A bunch of like-minded friends had turned bar conversations in The Beach into something more tangible, and in 1994 – a year after the club started – Mike finally turned up.
ERC’s first clubhouse – a Portacabin later shipped to our current site – was in Shelley Beach near the slipway at Belcher’s. The beach offered access at all states of the tide, but Mike’s carpentry skills were in instant demand. “There are lots of boats off that beach, both then and now, and we kept getting swept onto moorings. We were always breaking oars – maybe one a week – but they were wooden in those days so I could mend them. I wish I could do the same now but carbon fibre’s a different game.”
Over the intervening years, the club – like the river – has been in constant flux. Rowers come and go but Mike’s commitment to maintaining our hard-pressed offshore fleet has never wavered. A lifetime of working with his hands has taught him that simple skills – like lifting – repay a little concentration.
“It’s interesting to me to watch crews getting boats out of the water. Most of them drag the boat. That’s wrong. They’re just depending on brute strength when really what you need is intelligent muscle. People make hard work for themselves when they don’t need to. Just lift the front of the boat onto the trolley and let the water float the stern in. That way you save a lot of time, and effort…and, yes, wear and tear.” Mike undoubtedly has a point because he’s the genius who does the mending. Listening, guys?
A decade and a half of rowing, both off-shore and fine boat, has also given Mike an insight into the strange chemistry of all-women crews. The club has long attracted lots of female rowers, and over the years Mike devoted a lot of time and effort in training them. He believes that they always bring something special to the club, something that can all too easily be overlooked.
“In my opinion…” he says, “…our ladies are amongst the best rowers in the club. They’re very slide-conscious, very smooth, and you can feel all that in the movement of the boat. I think women in general are more sensitive than men. For one thing they use their senses better, they’re more aware, and for another they listen. Men are more aggressive, that’s true, but women have a different attitude completely. It’s a kind of quiet determination and it translates beautifully into rowing. Which is why women sit so well in a boat.”
Another recent club development that brings a smile to Mike’s face has been the sudden flood of new members. In his view, a club doesn’t exist without people like these. “The hardest part for anyone is walking in through that gate. Once you’ve got hold of them, once they start picking it up, there’s no problem. Rowing is brilliant in this respect. From the start, it teaches you a kind of loyalty to something bigger than yourself, it teaches you the importance of getting things right, it teaches you to be aware, it teaches you to look and to learn.”
To this end, Mike believes that nothing is better for the novice – or experienced – rower than to get out alone on the river and the estuary in single scull, and he gently suggests that the experience of having to make every decision for yourself does wonders for the learning curve. “You’ve got to sit the boat right. You’ve got to anticipate wind and current. You’ve got to know where the river runs fast and where it’s just a trickle. You got to know exactly where to go to get that cunning little ride on a tidal eddy and you’ve got to know where not to go if you don’t want to end up in a tidal race or on a sandbank. The quickest way to achieve all that is to take charge of your own fate by not relying on anyone else. It works in life and believe me, it works on the water.”
Looking and learning. For Mike Drew, three generations on, nothing changes.