Gary Kristensen paddled nearly 46 miles along the Columbia River in October.
Kyle Kristensen
At the annual West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta, boaters attempt to cross a watercourse in Tualatin using only a giant pumpkin as their vessel. The regatta will happen on Sunday.
Jim Sherwood is an extreme gardener and one of the founders of the festival. He recently won the National Pumpkin Weigh Off in California by growing a nearly 2,500-pound pumpkin.
Gourd grower Gary Kristensen has competed in the regatta since 2013. Earlier this month, he broke a Guinness world record by paddling a pumpkin nearly 46 miles along the Columbia River.
Sherwood and Kristensen join us to share more on the regatta, pumpkin paddling and what it’s like to grow these giants.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re gonna take a break from politics right now to talk about pumpkins. Jim Sherwood of Mulino grew a pumpkin this year that weighed 2,453 pounds – that’s a lot of spiced lattes. It was big enough to win the National Pumpkin Weigh Off in California. Jim isn’t just, in his words, an “extreme gardener.” He’s also one of the founders of the West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta, which is happening this Sunday. It is an annual event where fearless folks race on a lake in Tualatin using only giant gourds as their vessels. Pumpkin grower Gary Kristensen has competed in the regatta since 2013. This past weekend, he paddled a pumpkin nearly 46 miles along the Columbia River to try to break a Guinness world record. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Gary Kristensen: Thank you so much.
Jim Sherwood: Good to be here.
Miller: Gary, first – let’s just start with this past weekend’s world record attempt. What did you set out to do over the course of the weekend?
Kristensen: I was hoping to paddle at least a little over 39 miles to break the record. We encountered some troubles along the way, and were still able to do it, and made it almost 46 miles. But we hope that Guiness will approve that record.
Miller: 39 miles is the official current record?
Kristensen: So depending on … if you go directly to the Guinness source, it’s 39.17, converted to miles from kilometers.
Miller: You said you encountered some challenges. What were the challenges?
Kristensen: [Laughter] Oh yeah. There were 30 to 35 mile per hour winds about four or five miles into our trip. We started at Bonneville Dam, and the waves were pretty intense coming over the top of the pumpkin. I was filling up with water. It took about an hour to get from the middle of the river just to get to a beach, paddling as hard as I could, and wait out the winds. So that was one of the challenges.
Miller: Can you describe your … can I say boat? Can you describe your boat?
Kristensen: So it was a 1,200 pound pumpkin that I grew in my front yard in a subdivision. And we just carved the top out. Guinness asked us to weigh the material that we took out, and it was a couple hundred pounds. So we were still about 1,000 pounds of boat.
Miller: And why do you care how much weight you take out?
Kristensen: I think for interest of articles and being able to publish it.
Miller: So you scoop it, and it’s basically just a gigantic version of a jack o’lantern pumpkin that you might put on your porch?
Kristensen: Yeah. Except no holes in the side, just the top.
Miller: Right, it’s scary enough being floating on a river in a pumpkin without holes for eyes.
Kristensen: [Laughter] Yeah.
Miller: OK, so wind was a problem. What else?
Kristensen: Well, we ended up stranded on a beach. After the wind, I waited out the wind. I had a pontoon boat pick up and chase me at that point, a friend of mine. And we went for 16 hours and 46 minutes, and went through the night, sun came up. And we finally were able to find a beach to safely beach the pumpkin. I went to take a nap there on the beach for about an hour, and I woke up and the pumpkin’s high and dry on the beach. We spent like three hours trying to dig it off the beach and get it back in the water. My bad.
Miller: So there’s no crane there. How do you move a 1,000 pound pumpkin that’s high and dry?
Kristensen: We dug around it. But the problem we found when we started digging around it, there were cables in the sand that were there for tying off ships. And they were under the pumpkin, threatening a hole in the bottom of the pumpkin. So we were digging it and trying to twist it so it wouldn’t get punctured by these cables. It was quite a fiasco.
Miller: And that’s after kayak paddling 16 hours.
Kristensen: That was after the second leg that I went 16 hours and 46 minutes straight.
Miller: Were there cargo ships around you at this point?
Kristensen: Yeah.
Miller: Did folks acknowledge you?
Kristensen: So I think from a distance, we just looked like a kayak. But when boats got close, sometimes they turned around and made a lap to take another look. And then threw wakes, almost sank me.
Miller: But you did it, almost 46 miles. And so now you just have to wait for the official word from the Guinness folks, and then your name can be etched in history.
Kristensen: Yup, yup.
Miller: Jim Sherwood is with us as well. Let’s turn to the growing side of this. Jim, how did you get involved in competitive pumpkin growing?
Sherwood: It’s kind of a funny story. I had a kid that used to work for me. I was an arborist. And he invited me one day after work to come and help him pick pumpkins out of his garden. And I thought, well, that was an innocent enough request. He lived in the Canby area, and I followed him home one evening. And lo and behold, he had a garden full of 800, 900 pound pumpkins. I was hooked at first sight. I’m a pretty competitive person by nature. Once I asked him about a thousand questions that night, I followed him around to a couple of the events he entered. That was in 2000, and 24 years later, here we are.
Miller: Do you now look at an 800 or 900 pound pumpkin and just shake your head?
Sherwood: Oh, I don’t shake my head. Because for me, an 800 or 900 pound pumpkin is only gonna be about a month old. I look at it like “OK, we’re on our way.” But I also understand it takes a lot of know-how and failures, if you will, to eventually figure out how to get them bigger. So I don’t discredit or empathize with anybody that has an 800 or 900 pound pumpkin, because I know it’s just a step to get to the big one.
My whole goal is actually to get Gary to paddle one of my pumpkins in the Regatta, and maybe handicap him a little bit so somebody else has a chance to win.
Miller: A 2,400 pound pumpkin – what would it mean to paddle one of those in the Regatta, Gary? That’s twice as big.
Kristensen: For me, 650 to 700 pounds, maybe up to 800 pounds is about right for the regatta if you want to win. You need a boat that’s big enough to float you, but not so big that it’s going to slow you down.
Miller: Jim, I understand you were actually growing five giant pumpkins this year, but you ended up really with one. What happened to the others?
Sherwood: Well the other four, all in a matter of about two weeks in the first part of August, split in the blossom into the pumpkin. Once they get a hole in them, it makes them illegal for competition. I ended up with one out of five plants. And luckily enough, it was one that was my personal best, and I was able to win that competition with it.
Miller: Is splitting a common problem?
Sherwood: Very common. I was actually just talking to some fellow growers this weekend, and it seems like mother nature is pretty much against us from the get-go. The fact that we actually get one of these pumpkins to the scale at the end of the season is in and of itself almost a miracle. If it isn’t weather, or insects, or diseases, or genetics, it seems like we’re constantly trying to counteract what’s going on. In Gary’s instance, he had a soil disease problem. I grow more than one plant for that reason, because invariably I’m never going to get them all to produce a pumpkin at the end of the season.
Miller: How do you get an almost 2,500 pound pumpkin from Mulino to California to compete?
Sherwood: That’s a great question. Getting it out of the garden is part of the battle. When these things were 600, 700, 800, 900 pounds, we used to be able to get four or five people come over and you could get a tarp under the pumpkin. You could lift it up onto a pallet, and then with a forklift or something, put it in the back of your truck. But as they’ve gotten bigger, the friends quit showing up. So you had to figure out other methods of picking it up. I use a 14 foot steel tripod with a chain hoist and a special harness that we put around the pumpkin to lift it. And then we can lift it up high enough to actually back the truck right underneath the pumpkin, and then set it down gingerly on a very cushy, padded pallet.
Miller: Gingerly – that seems like an important point here. I imagine that folks have spent months growing what might be championship winning pumpkins, and then there’s a mishap and they’ve splatted.
Sherwood: I cringe when I see people bring pumpkins to a weigh off, and they’re just sitting on the pallet with no padding, because it only takes one pothole to crack these pumpkins. And if they come to the weigh off with a crack that goes all the way to the center of the pumpkin, then it gets disqualified. Back in the day when I first started, I found a futon on the side of the highway and I, as all good pumpkin growers do, collected that thing up, and eventually I put a pumpkin on it and carried it all the way down to California, on the futon on a pallet.
Miller: Jim, my understanding is your pumpkin won not just the Weigh Off for the heaviest pumpkin, but also the Howard Dill Award, which goes to the prettiest pumpkin. What makes a pumpkin pretty?
Sherwood: Well, I guess beauty is always in the eyes of the beholder. In the tradition of giant pumpkins, Howard Dill, who was from Nova Scotia, kind of created this strain of Atlantic giant pumpkin. So, as an honor put forth by the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth – which is an organization that oversees the fair, competitive weighing of these pumpkins – they’ve named the prettiest pumpkin award the Howard Dill Award, which generally is given to the prettiest, symmetrical, traditional looking pumpkin, if you will. But it is still a very subjective award, and sometimes not always the prettiest pumpkin wins. But it’s kind of one of those awards …
Miller: You’re saying it’s subjective. Have there been controversies where you and your fellow members of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth grumble?
Sherwood: Sometimes. Every site, they don’t dictate how the Howard Dill Award is chosen. So sometimes it’s done through a popularity vote. If you’re a grower that brought a huge contingent to watch you grow, and they let the general public vote, sometimes the voting isn’t necessarily the way that you would think it should go.
But in all fairness, it’s all good. We take a lot of pride in getting these pumpkins to the scale healthy. If you get the added bonus of winning the Howard Dill Award – which by the way, Gary has won at several of our events in the past years – it’s just kind of a feather in the hat that you know that you did a good job with a beautiful pumpkin.
Miller: Gary, so we talked a lot about your likely world record pumpkin paddle this past weekend. But this coming weekend is the Great Pumpkin Regatta. What can folks expect there on Sunday?
Kristensen: They can expect the absolute best Fall festival in the country. I do not know of a better event than the West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta. People come from all over the world to come here to the Portland area, Tualatin, to see this spectacle, to see people dressed in costumes, racing boats, pumpkin boats … them sinking … all the fun events that go on around the lake at the same time. And you know what? The whole thing is free. There’s thousands of people there cheering. I look forward to it every year. It is an absolute blast, and I will be there competing, and I hope there will be a lot of people there cheering me on now.
Miller: It seems like you have made this harder for yourself by paddling hours and hours and hours last weekend. Are you still in regatta shape now? Or have you spent all of your pumping, paddling energy for a world record?
Kristensen: Good question. I was thinking about that when I was paddling last weekend, like am I going to be able to paddle next weekend? My upper body feels great. My legs are killing me, like I ran a marathon.
Miller: What do you use your legs for in the pumpkin?
Kristensen: In the pumpkin I was sitting cross legged, and then I was switching to my knees. My legs hurt everywhere from the waist down. But I think I’ll be fine by this weekend.
Miller: Do you have any advice for first-time pumpkin paddlers?
Kristensen: Yeah, you want a pumpkin that is boat shaped. If it looks like a kayak, I’ve got one in my garden right now that is the most kayak looking pumpkin you will ever see ...
Miller: Just by chance?
Kristensen: Just by chance, genetics. It’s pointy on both ends and flat on the bottom. So it’s nice and stable.
Miller: Could you put it in a kind of mold to shape it that way? Like there’s a kind of Japanese watermelon tradition – my wife says my head looks like one of those.
Kristensen: You could. The pumpkin that I paddled down the Columbia this year I called “Punky Loafster,” because I had put boards on the sides, and it made it look like a loaf of bread. So it was a little bit narrower than it would have naturally grown, and it made it better for paddling.
Miller: Gary Kristensen and Jim Sherwood, it was a pleasure talking with both of you. Congratulations on your various accomplishments and good luck this weekend.
Kristensen: Thank you so much for having us.
Sherwood: Thank you.
Miller: That was Gary Kristensen and Jim Sherwood. Jim Sherwood is an “extreme gardener,” in his own words. Gary Kristensen is a pumpkin grower and a pumpkin paddler.
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