The modern sport of rowing is not like rowing your uncle’s rowboat at the summer cottage. In the rowboat, the seat was fixed, so that all the effort to move the boat with the oars came from your upper body and arms. But in modern rowing shells, the seat slides back and forth on a track inside the boat, such that most of the effort (70%) to move the boat comes from your legs rather than from your upper body and arms (only 20%). The remaining 10% of effort is supplied by your back.

There are two forms of modern rowing: “sculling” and “sweep rowing.”

In sculling the rower has two oars and therefore a sculling shell can be a one-person boat or a team boat with more than one person in it. Sculling boats are known as single, double or quadruple rowing shells.

In sweep rowing, each rower in the boat has only one oar, on alternate sides of the boat.  There are no one-person sweep rowing boats because without a minimum of two people in the boat, the boat would never go straight and would tip over.  Sweep rowing boats are know as pair, four or eight-oared rowing shells.

CRRPC teaches both sculling and sweep-rowing, but emphasizes sculling because sculling is the most effective way to teach people to row. Sculling also allows members the most flexibility, because they can chose to row by themselves without the need to get other people organized for a team boat, or to row with others in team sculling boats when it is convenient to do so.