Dear Crew Athletes and Families,

Welcome to the 2008 fall rowing season at the Amoskeag boathouse. The club is very pleased to be able to provide facilities for the Manchester Central, Concord, and Derryfield teams and is equally pleased to have watched the rapid growth of local high school rowing. The success of and support for your teams is amazing. If you are new to this great sport, you will soon discover that the athletes, parents, coaches and other supporters involved are top notch. I hope that you find the upcoming season challenging, rewarding and fun.

The increasing success and popularity of your teams has however, strained the limits of our facility’s capacity and there are several rules that we ask all rowers and their families to follow so that we can continue to function with approximately 200 student athletes using the site every afternoon.

First, it is very important that everyone understand that ARC is allowed to locate and operate its facility on town owned land through the generosity of the Town of Hooksett and that the boat launch and parking areas are public areas and access to them by other users must be assured. We are a very large group and need to be respectful users of the area.

Here is what our group needs to do:

1. Traffic
1. Please drive carefully and courteously in the vicinity of the courthouse and boathouse. The speed limit on the access road is 10 mph.
2. Car pool as much as possible to reduce traffic. It saves gas too!
3. If you are dropping off or picking up athletes, please do so in the courthouse parking lot. We ask that if you don’t have a real need for your car to be in the launch parking area, you don’t drive further than the courthouse parking lot.
4. Please don’t drive on the grass along the access road, as the town would like it to continue to be grass and not turn to dirt and mud!
2. Parking
1. Parking for athletes and coaches is extremely limited. Please car pool as much as possible to limit the number of cars parked on site during practices. Coaches will inform their athletes as to where they should park.
2. The northwest end of the launch parking area (the area nearest the launch ramp) needs to be kept open for emergency vehicle access and non-rowing users of the boat launch. There is a tree next to the river marked with an orange flag and an orange mark painted on the pavement across from the tree. Please do not park or stand (standing on your own two feet without your car is allowed) beyond the “imaginary line” formed by these two marks.
3. Parking is not allowed in the Courthouse parking lot prior to 4:15 PM on weekdays. Use of the lot is allowed on weekends and weekday evenings EXCEPT when the Thrift Shop is open (the third Saturday of each month from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM, all other Saturdays from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM, and on Wednesdays 6:30 to 9:00 PM.)
4. Parking is only allowed along the east-side (away from the river) of the access road and only to the extent that a car is parked completely on the gravel shoulder but not on the grass or pavement. No parking is allowed on the west-side (towards the river) of the access road. The access road must be kept open for wide trucks, trailers and emergency vehicles at all times.
5. Parking on the grass around the courthouse or along the access road is not allowed.
6. If the other parking areas are full, overflow parking is allowed in the unpaved turn-around loop, just south of the courthouse parking lot.
3. Garbage
1. All trash must be bagged. Please do not put trash into the cans without making sure it is going into the liner. If the bag is full, pull it out, tie it up and place it by the flag pole inside the boathouse gate. Help yourself to the supply of bags next to the ARC desk and line the can with a new bag.
2. Keep the lids on the garbage cans so that they don’t fill with rain.
3. The facility (boathouse, boatyards, ramp, ice rink and parking lot) needs to be cleaned up after every practice or race. All water bottles, clothing, food wrappers, etc. need to be picked up every day. Parents – you know the trail of stuff your kids can leave behind at home. Multiply that by the 200 teens we have using our boathouse and it isn’t a pretty picture. Everyone needs to clean up after themselves, please!
4. Most of our trash consists of disposable water bottles, many of them still full. In an effort to reduce the huge amount of trash we are generating and the waste of natural resources, the club strongly discourages the use of disposable water bottles at the boathouse. Please buy a reusable bottle, mark it with your name and team name and bring it with you to the boathouse. Don’t forget to take it home with you too.
5. All recyclable materials brought to the boathouse should be taken home and recycled. Our volume of garbage could be greatly reduced if we didn’t throw out containers that can be recycled. Recycling bins at the boathouse have been tried but the volume was huge and impossible to keep up with. It is easier, cleaner and more environmentally friendly to not use disposable water bottles in the first place.

Many thanks to everyone for your cooperation on these points. For the most part, it works pretty well given the large number of rowers we have on site, but in the interest of initiating the newcomers and reinforcing the rules with those returning, I thought it was worth repeating.

Once again, welcome and best of luck to all of you during the fall season,

June Larkins

President, Amoskeag Rowing Club