February 2025 Health & Fitness Grant Awarded to DoryWoman Rowing

Congratulations to Nicolle Littrell, owner of DoryWoman Rowing for being the WomensNet $10,000 February Business Specific Grant recipient in the category of Health & Fitness.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Jama Hernandez sat down with Nicolle for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Jama: Hi, my name is Jama with the WomensNet Advisory Committee, and I am excited to introduce our February 2025 winners. We have with us Nicolle with DoryWoman Rowing, who is our Health & Fitness category winner. As you know, February was our health and fitness focus, and she won the category award for that month. Thank you for being with us. To begin with our interview today, Nicolle, can you please tell us what DoryWoman Rowing is all about?

Nicolle: Sure! I am so excited to be here today and talking with you and thrilled to be a winner for the February grant! So, DoryWoman Rowing is totally one of a kind classically Maine business. What I do is I take people out for rowing lessons, guided tours, workout rows, and specialty rows like my full moon row that I do monthly- in my traditional style wooden Dory, which is a classic Maine boat. I row year-round. And my surfaces are open to all skill levels, all genders, all ages. I’ve had people in my boat from ages 8 to almost 90. And with this grant, I’m looking at extending my services to offering sauna in the winter after rows.

Jama: Great. Can you tell us a little bit how you began this? What inspired your business or who inspired your business?

Nicolle: I had been a recreational and competitive rower since 2012. And rowing was really an important outlet for me. I was a single mother and middle age, and I’d been an athlete growing up. And so one day I discovered this really awesome community rowing program right here in Belfast, Maine, where I live. And I was instantly hooked. These were traditional style wooden boats. And it just hit all the marks of fitness, wellness and community. And I fell in love with the ocean, even though I grew up in upstate New York on a dairy farm! 

I’ve been in Maine now going on 26 years. And then the big driver for this business was very similar to what Laura said. It was two things. It was the pandemic. So the pandemic is what inspired me to get my own boat, because the community rowing program that I was rowing with stopped- everything shut down just like everything else in the world. This was in March of 2020, so I thought I was going out of my mind not rowing. And ended up finding the boat that had this traditional style dory and invited friends that I had been rowing with to come out with me. And I found that I really loved guiding people how to row my boat, which was a different style of boat. And people kept asking me, when are you going take your boat out of the water? And I was like, well, let’s go to the end of the month and see how it is. And we got to the end of October, we got to the end of November. Before you know it, it was the end of the year and we were still rowing. So we rode throughout the winter and into the spring! And the wellness aspect was so obvious and palatable, you know, getting outside, getting on the water in this beautiful marine environment during really constrained, confined times. We have a lot here in Maine, a lot of access to the natural world. 

So people started saying to me, maybe you should start a business doing this. And I was like, maybe I should. And one of the requirements for taking people out in the water in Maine and charging them money for it is to be a licensed Maine guide. So I always thought in another life, maybe I would become a guide. That’s another story. But I always admired and fantasized about the guide’s life. And it ended up being this life. So I started the business in August. I became a guide in June of 2021. The other thing that happened is, I lost my job in the spring of 2021. I decided I needed to go for it. So it was the pandemic, it was losing the job. It was what I love. I’m a middle-aged woman, I need to just go for it. I’m jumping and I’m going to trust the net will appear. And it did. And I got my guide’s license in June of 2021. And then I started my business in August of 2021.

Jama: That’s an incredible story, and you’ve given me a lot of encouragement because I do love being out in the water but I never thought of that as a full-time thing! So that’s amazing. Super inspiring. What you’re doing is so unique, what strategies have you used to let others know about your business to get them out rowing or collaborations that you’ve done?

Nicolle: Rowing boats in general is often very affiliated with men, right? And in fact, my name DoryWoman Rowing, is really flipping the script around. When you look at the history of these type of boats, you always hear dorymen, doryman, that sort of thing. I’m a former gender studies professor, and so I like pushing up against the status quo. And hence the name DoryWoman. So I think the name in and of itself attracts interests for sure. 

And one of my skills is filmmaking and photography. So that is a great skill to have as a small business owner, a solopreneur. And I’m fortunate because I have the most amazing subjects to take photos when I’m out in my boat. I have the ocean, I have the sky, I have the water, I have abundant wildlife- so seals and porpoises and all kinds of avian life and rafter like osprey and eagles. I have the people in the boat who I get permission from to take their photos. 

My process has shifted a little bit as my business has grown. I’ll be celebrating the fourth anniversary of DoryWoman Rowing this summer. I started out with a lot of photography of place for sure. And so place is an important character in this story for sure. My boat is an important character in this story, but the people that row with me are as well. So it’s all about the story. It’s about creating stories and I see myself as much a storyteller as I’m a rower. So I love putting together reels and videos on Instagram. And what I found to be most successful it’s those things- capturing a beautiful moody day out on the water where it’s glass water, and you can see, you can see the oar reflected back in the water. You can see the sun in the water, the moon. There’s just endless amazing, gorgeous magical moments there. The look on people’s faces, which also reminds me some of what Laura was saying about the very empowering aspect and the fun aspect of what I’m offering with my services. So like Laura, most of my clientele are women. I row with men too- I actually get that question a lot. I do get men rowing with me solo or in the context of family, pairings or partnerships, whatever. I think it’s so much about the story. And so I really try to tell a story with my social media and then, you know, if I see an eagle or a seal, that gains a lot of interest.

I had this really crazy thing happen in January. I had my first viral video, and it was as mundane as a mooring marker, what boats ultimately tie up on in a harbor. And there are no boats in the water right now besides me and a few other people. That’s it. But there’s this lone mooring marker that was frozen into the ice, and I was out there for a row and it looked like something was on the other end of it. It was, it was moving through the ice, like something was dragging it. And so I started filming it and I was with somebody else in the boat, and we were both totally mystified. And I was saying out loud, is that a seal? Is that a fish? What is it? And so it’s funny because out of all the videos I’ve done and posts, I’ve never had 12.6 million views of anything like that! This was just so silly. And I put it up there, you know, knowing what it was, it was not a fish, it was not a sea monster. It was not any of these things that people were guessing. I put it up there just, just for engagement just for fun, just to be like, what do you think it is? And I knew what it was, and, you know, spoiler alert- it was just an anchor on the other end of the line. The way the ice was moving, the incoming tide- it was an optical illusion of sorts, and you would not believe the response. And, and so my point about that is, just having fun with it. I did not expect that kind of response, but having fun with it and there’s a story with it. So I really love telling the stories, almost as much as I love growing. So that’s definitely a strategy, is finding that story and who the characters are and elevating that a bit, having fun with it.

Jama: Well, it’s a great story, especially when you have the moon and the water as some of the characters! So very nice! Thank you so much for taking some time to meet with us and to let us know what you’ve been doing, and how you’re making this world and all of us a healthier, more beautiful place filled with awesome experiences. And congratulations again on your award, and we look forward to connecting with you later on in the year!