Whatever floats your pumpkin

By Charlene Arsenault

Last year, the first-ever Massachusetts Pumpkin Paddle was held at Long Pond in Rutland. Organizer and founder Craig Fitzgerald thought he'd be lucky to pull 100 people to the wacky event. It drew 1,000, and they didn't even have enough food.

The Paddle, a regatta where participants paddle their own (or provided) hollowed-out humongous pumpkins like kayaks, has generated such interest that these "racing" pumpkins will now have sponsors names painted on them like racecars. Perhaps TD Banknorth and Coca-Cola will pump some sponsorship dollars into this soon.

Marcia and Wes Dwelly of Oakham with their Atlantic Giants pumpkin.

It all started when Fitzgerald got the gift of his own big pumpkin. Three years ago, Fitzgerald's coworker gave him a giant pumpkin plant, so he threw it in the soil. It gave birth to a nice 70-pounder. He couldn't have been more proud.

The next year, he got another plant. Fitzgerald watered it a lot, but didn't do anything particularly special in tending to it. The thing got huge.

"I brought it to a local fair where it weighed in at 396 pounds," says Fitzgerald. "I brought it home, and it was just sitting there in the front yard." He'd gaze out the window at his big pumpkin, and wonder what else he could do with it (this must be how the Jack-o'-Lantern got started). So he browsed the Internet and stumbled across an article about a person from Nova Scotia who hollowed out his big pumpkin and paddled it in the water. It was the first he had ever heard of it, but he found the idea of carving a seating compartment into a pumpkin and paddling it across a pond extremely appealing.

So he, his wife, and daughter Marnie (who dubbed the pumpkin Pegasus), scraped two hundred pounds of guts out of the pumpkin, threw them in the compost pile, and transported the shell to Long Pond. "I got my friend's pickup truck to move it," says Fitzgerald. "I have a special lifting tarp — a giant-pumpkin-lifting tarp that has handles — because you cannot move it like a bag of groceries. If the pumpkin is 400 pounds, you have to have four friends over and you have to roll it on one side, then get the tarp underneath it and then roll it the other way. Then four or five people lift it onto the pallet and put it on the truck."

People caught wind of Fitzgerald's shenanigans, and it generated some excitement. "I said, ‘Well, maybe next year we'll have a pumpkin regatta,'" he says, "so we formed, with six of my friends, the Massachusetts Pumpkin Paddle Committee and met every two or three weeks for about five months to plan the first event. We didn't know how successful it would be."

Wes Dwelly, who's a professional giant-pumpkin-grower along with his wife Marcia, will indeed tell you that growing these pumpkins is an addiction. Female flowers opening in the morning. Hand pollination. Orange pumpkins. Not orange pumpkins. Getting the genetics of two plants into one. Not allowing more than one to grow on a plant. The art of cross-germinating these veggies and nurturing them throughout the summer season is more complicated than most realize.

Wes, who grew up on a farm, got hooked on the art in 1998 when Marcia worked as a postmaster in Hardwick and brought home some seeds someone had given her. They were Atlantic Giant seeds, and he just threw them in his garden. "Only one seemed to germinate," says Wes. "I planted it like anything else - it didn't do anything special. At the end, it grew to 275 pounds and it was a really nice looking pumpkin and that got me going. It's just an addiction. You want to go bigger and bigger and bigger. It would be worse if I were in the barroom drinking rather than growing pumpkins. This is just what I do."

And it is becoming something lots of people do. In 2000, the very first 1,000- pound pumpkin weighed in at the Topsfield Fair. This past year, the first 20 weighed there came in at least 1,000 pounds. In fact, Joe Jutras caused quite a stir in the community at Topsfield when he not only broke the previous year's record, but will make it into the Guinness Book of World Records with his 1,689-pounder.

There are growers' societies that offer memberships, allowing competitors to register pumpkins. The Dwellys, in fact, are members of the New England Pumpkin Growers Association. "We brought two pumpkins to the Topsfield Fair," says Marcia. "The one Wes entered was 1,190 pounds and he came in sixth place. Mine was 1,095 and it came in 12th."

The Dwellys are donating a pumpkin to the race this Sunday. That pumpkin, as with five others, will get to Long Pond at about 8 in the morning, when they'll be tossed into the pond to see how they float (to show the best spot to carve out the seat). Then, the pumpkins are hollowed out on shore, as well as painted by a graphic artist before the race at noon. Eighteen contestants will race in them in three different heats. They'll all try to make it through the quarter-mile run, and that's not easy. Last year, prizes included a loaf of pumpkin bread and a bushel of apples. This year, the first three places get trophies.

"They move erratically," laughs Fitzgerald. "They are very buoyant. You couldn't sink one, but they are very tippy because they are not canoe shaped. They have a mind of their own. Last year, one pumpkin didn't want to go. Each person who had that pumpkin went off course and had to be rescued each time because it went off into the weeds." o