WINDSOR, Nova Scotia — Leo Swinimer carefully climbed into his boat and dipped his paddle into the pond on a recent Saturday afternoon. The craft rocked back and veered to one side. Keeping the 600-pound pumpkin on course was going to be a trick.
"It's a cranky one this year," the 72-year-old said, fidgeting in the hollowed gourd as he tried to get his balance. Swinimer then attacked the pumpkin with a drywall saw, enlarging the opening enough to give him more room to paddle, but not enough to flood the boat. "If you don't sit in the right place, you'll sink," he said.
The next day, he was ready to face about four dozen competitors in the chilly waters of Lake Pesaquid as they paddled their supersize pumpkins over a three-quarter-mile course in the annual Windsor-West Hants Pumpkin Regatta.
The giant pumpkin weighoffs common across the United States and Canada are a bit old hat. Towns are coming up with novel ways to get more mileage out their massive harvest.
"There was just something lacking in our town," says Helen Romans, 66, a Windsor resident and former town councilor. She approached farmer Danny Dill eight years ago to ask how the town could better capitalize on its history as the birthplace of giant pumpkin growing.
Dill's father, Howard, had spawned a new era of competitive growing in the 1970s when he engineered mammoth pumpkins and patented the seed as Dill's Atlantic Giant.
But few took Danny Dill, 43, seriously when he proposed the race. "Nobody believed it could be done. They looked at me like I had three eyes," he said.
Today, the race attracts 10,000 spectators to Windsor, a town of 3,700. The event has grown from five entries to 54 this year, divided into two classes, a big one for contestants with kayak paddles, and a small one for motorized pumpkin boats. There were four of those this year.
Wayne Hackney, a 58-yearold pumpkin farmer who lives in Winchester, N.H., got there a bit before Windsor did. He was one of the first to use a pumpkin as a boat when he completed a twomile voyage across Candlewood Lake in western Connecticut in 1996. He rigged a three-horsepower motor to his pumpkin and outfitted the craft with abilge pump and a windshield. The trip took an hour and 15 minutes, attracting an armada, including a police boat from a nearby marina. Two years later, he organized a three-man race in Manhattan's Central Park, and later floated the idea of taking a trip to Martha's Vineyard offthe southeast coast of Massachusetts. "That would be an awful tough voyage," he says.
Since its first regatta in 1999, Windsor has inspired contests in such places as Cooperstown, N.Y., to Elk Grove, Calif. Three years ago, Ron Wilson started a regatta in Tualatin, Ore., after he was denied access to a trout lake next to the decommissioned Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Rainier. The electric utility company, Portland General Electric, "didn't like the innuendo that we had freakishly large pumpkins on a lake" near the former nuclear facility, says the 40-year-old soil scientist. An electric company spokesman says the company isn't able to accommodate every request for the use of its parks and that officials may have denied the request out of concern that pumpkins could not safely be used as boats.
One year, Wilson said, he watched a heavy-set competitor climb into a pumpkin that was too small, submerging it a foot below the water. Undeterred, he paddled the pumpkin across the finish line, with his head above water and his boat beneath the surface. "We called it the Submarine," he says.
As the races grow in popularity, serious racers are looking to breed better boats. "They're not well-shaped for sailing," says James Nienhuis, a professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin who started an annual race in Madison. He bred a sleeker version of the Atlantic Giant by crossing it with a pink banana squash.
Back at Windsor, the siren of a fire engine started the race, andfour boats overturned almost immediately, belching a mess of pumpkin pulp and turning the unlucky boaters into the lake. "It just wanted to sink," said Scott Brison, a contestant who happens to represent Windsor in Parliament. He says that competing in the race - and suffering "the ignominy of pumpkin naval disaster" - shows his constituents that he doesn't take himself too seriously.
Most racers buy their pumpkins from the Dill farm, but not Swinimer, the five-time defending champion who grows his pumpkins to be boats. During the hot summer months, when the pumpkins are pliable, he rolls them up on their stems to force them to grow flat and round "like a pancake," he said.
A week before the race, he takes them from the vine and opens them up with his saw and a crowbar. He and his "pit crew" - his son and a nephew - use custom-built aluminum scraping tools to thin down the inside walls, reducing the boat's weight as much as possible.
The race is serious business for him. He keeps a fiberglass replica of his first regatta-winning boat in the attic of his barn. Framed pictures of past races adorn a living-room wall, and he displays his trophies next to his fireplace.
Before the race, he stores his pumpkin boat inside the toolshed of his barn, letting it dry and reduce its weight. He fills the inside with foam to stiffen the thinned-out walls and then completes the drying process with a hair-dryer and space heater.
Swinimer has another racing advantage: thick, muscular forearms that earned him the nickname "Popeye" as a Halifax police officer.
During the race, Swinimer cut through the water with his rotorlike paddling, leaving many out-of-breath competitors in his wake. He reached the dock first, to a hero's reception from the crowd.
After collecting his trophy - a carved wooden pumpkin with silver plaques that name past winners - a ribbon and a $200check, Swinimer announced that he's retiring.
His family, looking on, had heard it all before. "Every year he says it's the last one," said his son-in-law, Ian Poole. "But as soon as March or April comes up, he'll be out growing them again."
Front Section, Pages 2 on 10/28/2007