By Jesse Ellison
Photos by Hannah Hoggatt
From our March 2025 issue
On a bright, blustery afternoon last spring, six women rowers gathered next to a shingled equipment shed on Belfast Harbor and began putting on sweatbands and slim, inflatable life jackets. They talked and laughed with the easy, jocular cadence of a group that had been practicing together three times a week for the past 10 months. But once the members had lowered themselves into their creaky wooden craft, known as a Cornish pilot gig, all conversation ceased. In its place, a steady, nearly silent rhythm took over, punctuated by the occasional direction of a coxswain perched in the stern. By the time they reached the mouth of the bay, the women’s oars moved in perfect unison, like appendages on some six-legged sea creature gliding across the water’s surface. Throughout the hour-long journey, their movements appeared just as graceful, even effortless. But when they returned to the dock, Steffanie Pyle, who had forgotten her gloves, revealed a palm rubbed raw where it had gripped the wooden oar.
The women, along with coxswain John Dillenbeck, were practicing for the World Pilot Gig Championships in Cornwall, England, in May, where they and two other teams from a local community-rowing organization, Come Boating!, would be the only Americans competing. The women’s team would race in the Ladies’ Open, the most competitive class for women, while their fellow Mainers would race in the Men’s Open and a contest for rowers over age 50. But the Ladies’ Open rowers, a mix of experienced oarswomen and relative newcomers, were America’s best hope. A month before the April practice, the team won at the annual Snow Row race, in Massachusetts, while also setting a course record for pilot gigs. “We take it pretty seriously,” says Leigh Dorsey, a United States Coast Guard Academy grad and rowing coach who took up the sport in high school. “We know the level of rowing is way higher over in Cornwall, so the chance to test ourselves against some really good teams is a lot of the drive to make the trip over.”
At 32 feet long by nearly five feet wide, Cornish pilot gigs are shorter and wider than sleeker racing shells, allowing rowers to maneuver over short distances in choppy waters. They originated in 17th-century Cornwall for rescuing sailors who wrecked off the county’s rockbound coast, and they were later used to race harbor pilots out to incoming ships (the first pilot to arrive got the job of guiding the ship into port — and the pay that went with it). The World Pilot Gig Championships started in 1990 and today attract some 150 clubs, primarily from England, but the sport is gaining ground elsewhere, including in Maine, which is home to five pilot-gig clubs.
Still, “in England, they kind of look at Americans and laugh,” says Dorsey, who previously competed with teammate Tanya Lubansky in the 2018 world championships. For last year’s contest, the Belfast teams shared a gig borrowed from local coach Steve Lock. But when the women got in, they discovered the fixed wooden slats racers press their feet against when rowing, called foot stretchers, were spaced too far apart. “It doesn’t matter,” Dorsey remembers Lock telling her team with a shrug. “You’re just here to have fun.” So the women scoured the area for scrap wood they duct-taped to the existing stretchers to achieve a better fit.
“I’ve never been on a team like this,” rower Leigh Dorsey says. “There was this net of trust that allowed us to pour everything we had into our oars, knowing that everyone else on the team was giving everything they had as well.”
Before the roughly 1.8-mile seeding race for the Ladies’ Open, more than 150 pilot gigs formed a mile-long starting line. “The collective hush in the seconds before the start, then the mayhem of nearly a thousand oars hitting the water at the same time and the coxswains screaming — it was magical,” Dorsey says. After the results of three more races on a roughly 1.4-mile course were tallied, the Belfast team placed 21st. “We had a blast,” Dorsey says. “And I think a lot of people were really surprised.”
