RowZone Manayunk and Vesper Boathouse presents the most flexible and complete Learn to Row Program.  Our program includes:

• Two rowing technique sessions – these sessions focus on the proper form; essential to everyone that plans to row on water.  Ergs will be connected to sliders creating the same motion as rowing on the water. ($60 value)
• Twenty group sessions; 45 minutes each available 7 days a week  ($200 value)
• One on the water rowing morning session ($125 value)
• One pass to 4^th of July Vesper Boathouse Tour and Social.  Watch the fireworks in the company of National Level Rowers; from one of the most exclusive sites in the country, while enjoying complementary beverages ($30).

Learn to row package $299 (a $415 value).  http://rowzone.com/manayunk/row-on-the-water/

http://blogs.phillymag.com/bewellphilly/2013/04/18/rowzone-rowing/

To celebrate it we are offering 5 classes at $35 (regular price is $90) so new Clients can try us out!  Here is the link to the offer.

OUTSIDE MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 2011

SCULL CRUSHERS

By: MICHAEL ROBERTS

On wind-blasted San Fran­cisco Bay, a crew of hardcore rowers dodges freighters and fog banks for kicks. They are mostly women over 40. And they will destroy you.

THIS IS A STORY OF ADVENTURE that ends with a gold medal and glory. Along the way there is the hubris of youth, friendly porpoises, and a moment of true terror.

It begins on a commuter ferry one morning last summer in the middle of San Francisco Bay, where I spotted two rowers gliding past Alcatraz in what looked like collegiate racing shells. My first reaction: Holy crap!The bay is a wicked place for boating, with swirling currents, menacing fog banks, and winds that regularly blow 20 to 30 knots. The water temperature hovers around 55 ­degrees. There are great white sharks. It’s not a place for small open-cockpit craft—or so I wrongly assumed. A minute of smartphone Googling led me to the site of the Open ­Water Rowing Center (OWRC) in Sausalito, just north of the city. Apparently, folks there have been charging around in modified shells for 25 years.

Really, I shouldn’t have been so surprised. The Bay Area has long been a magnet for adven­ture-sports pioneers. America’s oldest trail-running race, the Dipsea, has been held on Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais since 1905. Gary Fisher and crew invented mountain biking on the same slopes in the 1970s. Today, San Francisco and its surround­ing burbs are loaded with kitesurfers, paragliders, and big-wave surfers. Growing up here, I’d often felt insufficiently gnarly.

Rowing struck me as an easier pathway into the local fraternity of badasses, especially when I discovered that many of the 100-plus OWRC regulars were at least 50 years old and a good number qualified for ­Social Security. They were at that stage in life—kids grown up, wealth accumulated—where they had the time to row and the ­resources to buy a boat ($4,000 and up) and pay for storage ($1,500 per year). Plus, most of the really serious mem­bers were women.

For about $475, I signed up for two novice lessons and a three-month fall membership, which included unlimited use of the 11 club shells. Once I got the basics down, I could join group workouts. There was also a three-hour rough-water clinic involving a row under the Golden Gate Bridge. In November, I’d be welcome to race in the annual 8.4-nautical-mile regatta around Angel Island. The way I saw it, at just 36 years old and moderately fit, I’d be the club stud by Thanksgiving.

Then I met the two Marys.

LIKE CROSS-COUNTRY SKIING, rowing is 95 percent technique—a series of sequential ­motions, each critically important. Imagine trying to shoot a basketball using giant chop­sticks while running backward. Unlike, say, learning to ride a bicycle, you never just “get it.” Even veterans work on the ­mechanics constantly.

And so it was that I found myself bobbing nervously among eight other rowers at the start of a group row on a clear September morning. Since my lessons, I’d completed a handful of frustrating solo outings. I was so eager for speed that I was constantly digging my oars too deep or barely skimming the surface. Several times, I’d nearly pitched headlong into the drink.

Outside Magazine, October 2011

http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/dropping-in/Scull-Crushers.html