Ocean Pines/Ocean City Club Learns About Mushing
by David Landis

Ocean Pines residents, Linda and Kevin Powers, have a unique hobby. It's recreational mushing. Yeas, mushing! Remember Sgt. Preston of the Yukon and his plea, "Mush you huskies"? Leave it to J. Graham Caldwell, Chairman for Guest Speakers for the Kiwanis Club of Greater Ocean Pines/Ocean City Maryland, to find someone to speak about an interesting and unusual subject like mushing on the Eastern Shore.

Linda, a retired teacher, and her husband Kevin, retired from NSA, moved to Ocean Pines from Columbia, Maryland over three years ago. While there is plenty to do in Ocean Pines, there was still more that Linda wanted to do to keep herself and her five year old Siberian Husky, Taya, healthy and in shape. As she tells it, her French Canadian heritage, her life growing up in Maine, and even her experience as a volunteer in Alaska teaching the Eskimos for one year, influenced her choice to seek out mushing. Linda is the one who actually mushes the dog team which has grown to four. Taya now has Chinook, Kodiak, and Fenway to help pull the sled.

You're likely wondering, as did the members of the Kiwanis Club, how does Linda mush here at the seashore with the lack of snow. The answer is called dune mushing with a special cart that has airplane wheels and can run on the sand. The dogs can only train with the cart when the temperature plus the humidity does not exceed 100 combined. Linda often chooses Assateague Island to run the dogs as the temperature there is lower than on the Ocean City beach.

All the races Linda enters are naturally in the winter in places where there is snow. The fall season provides time enough to get the team in shape and ready for the winter races, many of which are held in Pennsylvania where Linda and her dogs belong to the Pennsylvania Sport Dog Club.

Pictured from left to right are J. Graham Caldwell, Kevin Powers, Linda Powers and Kiwanis Club President , Ed Schaefer while Taya looks on approvingly, and that's no mush.