Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
Harry Hurt, seated, is taught proper rowing technique by Peter Darrow in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

I CROUCHED in the cockpit of a recreational scull, pulling on a pair of oars and going nowhere. It was an unseasonably warm Saturday morning on Sag Harbor Cove at the far eastern end of Long Island. The sky was blue, the waves were flat and my knees were bent as I tried to execute a rowing stroke with my back toward the bow.

My instructor, Peter Darrow, 57, clutched the stern of the scull between his thighs, holding it steady against the knee-deep tide a few feet from the grassy bank. A lean and lanky lawyer, he has been rowing for more than 25 years, including stints on competitive crews at Columbia and Trinity College at Oxford.

“Now roll your wrists forward,” Peter commanded. “Feather the blades into the water, and push with your legs.”

I did more or less as instructed, expecting to remain motionless. But this time, Peter purposely let the scull slip away. I glided backward about seven yards, the equivalent of a boat length. I felt a gentle breeze waft across my neck and shoulders.

“You’re going to find that rowing is a great way to get close to nature,” Peter said.

I leaned toward the stern of the scull and commenced another stroke. The boat lurched slightly to the left. I glanced to my right, and saw Lee Oldak, founder of the new Sag Harbor Community Rowing Club, waving at me from the bank.

“Look out behind you!” Lee shouted.

I twisted around just as the bow of my scull rammed broadside into a scull with another novice on the oars. The other boat barely shuddered from the collision, but my boat tipped over, toppling me head first into the water. Fortunately, it was so shallow, I was able to scramble onto my feet within seconds. I heard howls of laughter coming from the bank and the other boat.

“Guess I got a little too close to nature,” I muttered.

Naturally, the drenching refreshed my determination to continue my executive pursuit of learning to row. As Peter waded over to help stabilize my boat, I silently reviewed the due diligence I had done on this sport that began as a means of transportation for commerce and warfare.

Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
A view of the cockpit of a rowing scull.

References to rowing can be found in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, “The Aeneid” by Virgil, tales of Viking conquests, and records of 18th-century London guilds and waterborne livery companies. As Peter learned during his college rowing career, the first boat race between Oxford and Cambridge was held in 1829 on the Thames. In 1852, Harvard beat Yale in America’s first intercollegiate sports contest, a boat race on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Rowing races were also part of the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896.

Unlike football or basketball, rowing remains a purely amateur sport in the United States with a relatively small but growing following. “We estimate that there are about 250,000 rowers in the U.S., of whom 100,000 compete on a regular basis,” Brett Johnson, communications director of USRowing, the sport’s American governing body, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Johnson added that USRowing’s most recent youth national championship had attracted 1,250 entrants, up from 650 entrants in 1998, while turnouts for the organization’s most recent masters (age 27 or over) and club national championships were the biggest in history.

Mr. Oldak, 53, owner of a sporting goods store in Amagansett, N.Y., is among the relative newcomers. An accomplished sailor, he said he was inspired to organize the Sag Harbor Community Rowing Club after attending a regatta in Riverhead, N.Y., in November that attracted numerous local high school and club teams. The club now has nine boats and close to 20 members. Annual dues are $250 a person.

There are two main categories of rowing, defined by the number of oars used by each person. In “sweep” rowing, each rower holds a single oar with both hands. Sweep boats can have two, four or eight rowers; the so-called eights include a coxswain who is responsible for steering the boat as well as for coaching and motivating the crew. In “sculling,” the style of rowing I sampled, each rower holds two oars. Boats come in two types, racing and recreational, and three configurations: singles, doubles and quads (four people).

“In a single scull, you’re free from having to rely on someone else to help you row,” Peter noted. “But you’re also completely on your own when it comes to steering and stabilizing the boat. In an eight-person crew, you’ve got seven other oars to give you balance.” He said a single sculler could reach a top speed of more than 13 miles an hour, almost as fast as the top speed of a boat with eight oars.

I took my introductory lesson from Peter in a recreational single scull that cost $3,900. Its carbon fiber hull measured 21 feet from bow to stern, about 5 feet shorter than a typical racing scull, and it weighed a little over 30 pounds. The oars, which cost $500 a pair, were 10 feet long, with oval-shaped carbon fiber blades.

The cockpit measured 21 inches across, nearly half again as wide as a racing scull cockpit. It featured a composite plastic sliding seat mounted on tracks, wooden footrests with Velcro straps, and a set of metal bars called riggers with collared oar locks.

As Peter patiently explained and demonstrated, a basic rowing stroke has four phases. In phase one, “the catch,” you sit at the stern end of the seat tracks and rotate the oar handles forward so that the blades dip into the water. In phase two, the “drive,” you push against the footrests with your legs, which causes the seat to slide toward the bow and makes the oars pull against the water. In phase three, “the finish,” you rotate the oar handles toward your stomach, causing the blades to “feather” or lift, out of the water. In phase four, the “recovery,” you move back toward the stern again with the oars blades skimming across the water.

A technically competent rower can combine all four phases of the stroke into a rhythmic sequence. “The whole point is fluidity and ease of motion,” Peter said. “If you move your arms and legs properly, it’s almost effortless. If you move them improperly, it can be very painful and destructive to your muscles.”

After my umpteenth practice session next to the grassy bank, Peter finally allowed me to risk a second excursion into Sag Harbor Cove. By this time, Lee Oldak and the half-dozen other members of the Sag Harbor Community Rowing Club on the water that morning had rowed their sculls safely away from my intended path.

Peter climbed into a club scull and followed me, assessing my technique and making sure I didn’t ram a dock or one of the power boats moored nearby. Somehow I managed to approximate the proper movements on about every fourth or fifth stroke.

Amid all my catching, driving, finishing and recovering, I discovered, as every experienced rower knows, that sculling is a delightfully low-impact aerobic exercise that works nearly every muscle in your body. I also discovered an unexpected serenity. Aside from my own huffing and puffing, all I could hear was the splish-splish of the blades going in and out of the water punctuated by the popping of the oar handles against the locks on the rigger.

I was reminded of John Cheever’s semisurrealistic short story, “The Swimmer,” in which the protagonist makes an emotionally wrought attempt to cross Westchester County by swimming the length of one backyard pool after another. I began to fancy myself as “The Sculler,” an oarsman destined to row, row, row my boat merrily across the country from Sag Harbor Cove to San Francisco Bay as my life became a dream.