Gotta Lotta Regatta

After an intense week of bookwork, my schedule has not let up. The Christ Church Regatta, which I guess is a race of all the novice boats among all the colleges (though who everybody really was, I'm not sure), ran from Wednesday to Saturday. I haven't been payed much attention by the Catz crew, and while they don't practice often, they put me on the list even less frequently. I had been on the water all of twice when I got an email on Friday asking me to sub in for someone who would miss Day Two of the race. The regatta was double elimination, and they split their two races the day before, advancing farther than our other two boats. The boat, arbitrarily nicknamed 'Hurricane', is the one I had been out with before, so I guess I was on the bottom of their list. The seat I was asked to fill was a stroke-side oar (i.e., port, i.e., off to the right as the rowers face, i.e. facing backwards), and I have for ever rowed on bow-side (i.e., the other side), so that was pretty disorienting. It didn't matter too much, though, because we won that race.

The race was standard fare, although maybe some of you have never seen one before. Marshals wearing bright coats and connected by walky-talkies stand at intervals along the river, overseeing all the traffic. They race two boats at a time, starting one half a boatlength ahead of the other, and after a little nudging this way and that ("Boat A, take one stroke, too far, Boat B, take one stroke"), yell, "Attention!...Go!" There's a flurry of oars, frantic splashing, and within two minutes it's over. Then there's the game of getting back to the boathouse, ours being very near the start of the race. The first day I raced, there were still many crews in the competition, so we were inching along the wall in a line of thirteen boats, waiting for races to pass so that we could, one or two at a time, cross over to the other side of the river and dock.

Winning our third race kept us in for today's races. The seat I subbed for on Friday was filled, but someone else didn't show up so I had his seat, and thankfully it was a bow-side oar. Actually, it was 'bow', the seat in the front of the boat but in back of the rowers (hence the identification of the starboard oars as "bow-side"). Oh, just a note: In the states, we use port and starboard to name the oars, which is much more sensible, since not all boats are rigged the same way, and in some the stroke (leading oar) is rigged to starboard and the bow to port.

I'm running out of storytelling energy, and I didn't start with much. Point is, we won our first race today but lost our second. In the first race, after we had pulled to a comfortable lead, our stroke (once again, the rower sitting in front of all of us who everyone else is supposed to follow) 'caught a crab', meaning he did not successfully lift his blade from the water at the end of his stroke, so the river grabbed it and it was dragged along parallel to the boat. It can be extricated from such a position, and was, but had the race been closer, this event would have affected the outcome.

Overall, the regatta was a pretty miserable experience, but it was a rich experience nonetheless. It was cold and wet both days. In a boat you get cold and wet no matter what the weather, so those things were compounded, and the boathouse isn't heated either. The crew, being slightly-trained novices, has yet no sense of balance, so the boat was never 'set', even when we weren't moving, thus we were doing a lot of crooked sitting. Then of course rowing is hard, especially with a novice crew with no sense of balance who like to rush up the slide and then rush the stroke. But winning is fun, and we did some of that.