Good gourd: Florence man jacked after squashing record for pumpkin paddling down river

Hop in a car at the Stillwater Bridge in Deerfield and you can make it to the Dinosaur Footprints in Holyoke in about a half-hour. A bicycle can you get you there in roughly 2½ hours, and walking will likely take you eight hours.

Dave Rothstein now knows it can take 22 hours over three days to go by pumpkin.

The Florence resident paddled a donated gourd at least 40 miles down the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers between Saturday and Monday in an attempt to break a Guinness World Record while also drawing attention to the Connecticut River watershed.

“I’m not actually feeling tired. I’m feeling enthused and happy and supported,” Rothstein said late Tuesday morning. “It feels wonderful to accomplish something you set out to do and bring people together in the process.”

It appears Duane Hansen, of Nebraska City, Nebraska, holds the record for longest distance by pumpkin boat, paddling 37.5 miles in 2022. A Missouri man reportedly ventured more than 38 miles in a 1,200-pound pumpkin down the Missouri River in October, but Rothstein said Guinness World Records has not yet certified that feat.

Rothstein, 55, said he got his idea from the annual Pumpkin Regatta in Goffstown, N.H. He received a 1,024-pound pumpkin, which placed second in the Big E’s heaviest pumpkin contest, from Blandford resident Pete Thayer.

Rothstein hallowed out the gourd and reweighed it at Adhesive Applications — an Easthampton manufacturer of pressure-sensitive adhesive film, PE foam and transfer tapes — because the business has a scale big enough. The gutted pumpkin weighed about 715 pounds. Rothstein initially planned to launch into the river on Nov. 3 but moved the date a day ahead due to weather forecasts and other considerations.

The folks at Bar-Way Farm in Deerfield used a tractor to get the pumpkin into the water at the Stillwater Bridge and Rothstein paddled 8.2 miles over six hours to the river access point on Poplar Street in Montague.

“That first eight-mile stretch was filled with rapids and shallow water and lots of rocks. I would liken it to riding a bucking bronco on the water … with only one near-capsize,” Rothstein said with a laugh. “After that, I learned how to bail out the pumpkin, which is important. … Every 10 minutes, I would have to kind of stop and bail it out.”

The paddler then went 16 miles on Sunday, going under the Sunderland Bridge and seeing Mount Sugarloaf before stopping at the Hatfield public boat ramp.

“Monday was the hurry-up-if-you-want-to-break-that-record day,” Rothstein said, adding he paddled another 16 miles to get to Holyoke at roughly 4:30 p.m. “Even a kayak or a canoe goes 10 times faster than a pumpkin. It felt like I was in wilderness, and you could see the changes in the river, changes in the geology, changes in the vegetation along the way.”

He mentioned he left the pumpkin by the side of the river at the end of each leg of his journey. Rothstein plans to cut up the rest of the pumpkin and donate it to a livestock farmer to use as feed. The seeds will go back to Thayer, who grew the pumpkin.

Rothstein, a wildlife biologist and environmental attorney by profession, said he received critical help from friends, some of whom paddled near him in a kayak to ensure his safety. Leila Everett, the manager of Northampton Bicycle, was Rothstein’s GPS tracker, monitoring and guiding his adventure from dry land. .

Everett said many people came to see Rothstein launch and then cheered him on during his journey.

“The number of people there to see him off was really kind of cool,” she said. “They had drones.”