Charlene Coleman could be the hardest working boater on the river. When she’s not fighting to open the Chattooga headwaters to paddlers, she's working on the Lake Murray dam relicense, or keeping the Saluda River clean, or volunteering at Canoeing for Kids, or teaching people how to kayak during the summer. If there’s a river-related issue in South Carolina, chances are this 48-year old boater has a hand in the negotiations. It’s this sort of behind the scenes heavy lifting that garnered her the first ever "Steward of the Year" award from American Whitewater and Wavesport.

BRO: How does it feel to be the inaugural Steward of the Year award recipient?
CC: It’s nice. You start to get the feeling that nobody notices your work. Hopefully, this award will inspire other people to get involved.

BRO: You spend a lot of your time working on the Chattooga headwaters boating ban. What’s new on that front?
CC: The Forest Service has started the boater study, so for the first time in 30 years, we have boaters on the headwaters. It’s a big step towards some sort of agreement. I can live with the boating ban if they prove the impact is too great. I couldn’t live with the decision if they never did the study.

BRO: Why was the ban, the only one of its kind, enacted in the first place?
CC: It was arbitrarily closed. They didn’t do any impact studies. They just closed it. It was also a volatile area. Locals felt it was their god-given right to drive their trucks through the river because they’d been doing it all their lives. And it was fully stocked with trout, so it became a popular fishing destination. Some fishermen at the time said they had conflicts with boaters, but the boaters back then were locals in a canoe with their cooler and their shotguns. That’s not the type of boater that would run that river today.

BRO: Why is it so important to fight this ban?
CC: It’s raised concerns in other areas of land management. If the forest service is allowed to zone out a particular user group without studies, then federal land managers could do that nationwide. They could feasibly ban fishing on BLM land because it’s too expensive to stock. We’re not being greedy. We see the big picture. We’re fighting over a law that was broken.

BRO: Tell us about your other passion, Canoeing for Kids.
CC: It’s an organization that takes terminally ill and under-privileged kids on canoeing, kayaking, and rafting trips. Some of these kids are one foot out of jail, others are terminally ill. This is something that most of them would never come into contact with otherwise, so these trips give them the feeling that they’ve done something really good.

BRO: Wavesport let you choose a boat along with the "Steward of the Year" award. Which boat did you choose?
CC: The Diesel 64, but I haven’t been able to paddle as much as I’d like. Between the Lake Murray Dam relicensing meetings, volunteering with the Oconee County Safety and Rescue Team, the Chattooga, and teaching beginners how to paddle, there’s not much free time anymore.