I was at the boat house at 6:40 this morning, ready for a nice day of racing in the Pembroke Regatta, a side-by-side tournament. The river has been flooding severely the past week due to large amounts of snow and rain, and was still roughly a meter above its usual level. Our nice concrete bank that lets us launch boats without getting our toes wet was completely submerged, so we had to do a lot of wading around in freezing cold (snow melt) water.
When we finally made it up to the race marshaling area, we found out that our competition (Kings M3) had dropped out, so we just rowed back to the boat house to wait for the next round 3 hours later. Needless to say everyone was a little annoyed at waking up that early and not racing. We went up to marshal again for the second round, only to find out that LMBC (St. John’s) M5, who we were supposed to be racing, had broken their boat and dropped out. So no race again.
Our first race was the semi-finals against our own M3. We spent several minutes bantering on the starting line, including one suggestion that we both “back it down” (i.e. rowing backwards) the whole race, which the marshals were quick to forbid. The race itself was epic. They got a slightly better start, and then, due to some dodgy (malicious?) coxing on their part, they came right over into our half of the river, causing a massive blade clash (oars smacking against each other making it quite difficult to row), after which they were a little over half a boat length up. During the rest of the race we held them there, and they finished less than a boat length ahead (i.e. overlapping their boat by a meter or two). It hurt like hell, but was quite satisfying because they were supposed to be a faster crew, and beat us by 30 seconds in the race last weekend.
So basically I spent all day faffing about on the river for one nice race.
Also, living in a country the size of the U.K. has some advantages. I ordered some new strings for my guitar yesterday afternoon, with standard shipping, and they arrived here less than 24 hours later.
