Standing on the dock at Riverside Park in Hartford, Douglas Antczak watched his sister lower herself into a rowing shell and set the oars in the murky water of the Connecticut River.
As she pulled the boat across the water to the distant shore, he was impressed, but not surprised.
Ever since his sister, Alexia Bouckoms, was paralyzed nine years ago when a tree fell on the family car, killing her husband and one of her sons, nothing she has accomplished surprises her family.
Her decision about a month ago to try rowing was just another example, 
Antczak said, of his sister''s tireless search for new ways to enjoy life.
It allows me to use my body in a different way, said Bouckoms, a dentist by training who was in a coma for six weeks after the freak accident.
Bouckoms is one of eight people with disabilities who are participating in the newly established Connecticut Adaptive Rowing Program, a partnership 
led by the Rehabilitation Hospital of Connecticut with Riverfront Recapture and the National Spinal Cord Injury Association''s Connecticut chapter.
In adaptive rowing, boats are outfitted with special gear to accommodate disabilities.
The program first took to the water on June 1, after some dry-land training for both able-bodied participants and those with disabilities. On Monday and Wednesday evenings through September, pairs of rowers put in at Riverfront Recapture''s Greater Hartford Jaycees Community Boathouse in Riverside Park and row for an hour, knifing up the river, north of the railroad bridge and back again at least once and often twice.
On Monday evening, with the air temperature still hovering around 90 degrees without a breeze, Bill Mancini slid his boat back to the dock as Bouckoms was pulling out. After rowing for almost an hour, his gray T-shirt was soaked with sweat and he was puffing.
"I''m exhausted," said Mancini, 32. "But it''s good exhaustion."
Mancini, of West Hartford, has been paralyzed from the chest down since October 1993, when he suffered a spinal aneurysm. He still enjoys lifting weights, plays a little golf and basketball and has done some kayaking. But he had never gotten behind the oars of a rowing shell.
"It was much more difficult than I thought it was going to be," he said.
"We didn''t say it would be easy," joked Paige McCullough-Casciano, a certified therapeutic recreation specialist who paired up with Mancini to row up the river Monday.
McCullough-Casciano co-directs the rowing program with Joan Karpuk, a physical therapist at the Rehabilitation Hospital of Connecticut, which is part of St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center. Despite the physical challenge, said McCullough-Casciano, not one of the rowers who started the program has dropped out.
McCullough-Casciano said that the idea for the adaptive rowing program was first floated about five years ago by a spinal injuries support group that meets at the hospital''s Blue Hills Avenue campus. Mancini is a member of the group. However, there were no resources at the time, she said. Two years ago, she and Karpuk traveled to Philadelphia to learn about an ambitious adaptive rowing program there. Last year, the hospital got a $6,300 grant from the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation to buy and equip boats and establish the program.
The boats are standard, 18-foot, two-person Alden rowing shells. One of the standard sliding seats is replaced with a stationary seat with a rigid back and, for rowers who need it, a girdle that fits around the chest to hold them in the seat. The other seat, used by an able-bodied partner, is a sliding seat that allows the use of the legs.
A set of pontoons fit onto the front of the shell to add stability, which is especially important when participants with disabilities are helped into the boats from the dock.
McCullough-Casciano said that adaptive rowing is a growing sport. Rowing has been added as a demonstration sport at the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing.
And while Beijing may be ambitious for now, Karpuk, who participated in crew while in college, hopes some of the Hartford rowers will build their skills enough to compete in local regattas and perhaps in an adaptive rowing regatta in Philadelphia.
For her part, Bouckoms, of Farmington, said she is content to see Hartford from the perspective of the river, instead of the highway. On Monday, she brought her brother who was visiting from Ithaca, N.Y., to see what she could do."I don''t focus on what I can''t do," Bouckoms said. "I can''t walk, but that''s about the only thing I can''t do."