Rowing Your Boats

Annual Regatta Grows

Continuing to grow the city's annual Stonewall Regatta, the local GLBT rowing club, D.C. Strokes, on June 2 offered the 14th regatta with 22 rowing clubs and about a dozen more heats than last year's event. While the Stonewall Regatta attracts hundreds of rowers from mainstream clubs to the Anacostia River, this year's event also brought two gay clubs: the Boston Bay Blades and Chicago's Q-Crew.

''D.C. Strokes had some very strong finishes -- some photo finishes -- which is testament to our much more intense training,'' says Joe Henderson, a D.C. Strokes board member and registrar for the regatta, granting his team saw no first-place showings. He added that the Stonewall Cup went to the Capital Rowing Club.

But Henderson points out that win or lose, the regatta was a great success. ''The party at Halo was the best post-regatta party we ever had,'' he says, owing that to the highest level of sponsorship the event's ever received, from businesses, aside from Halo, such as Nellie's Sports Bar, Whole Foods and Barefoot Wines.

Full results from the regatta are available at www.stonewallregatta.org.