First things first - what rowing have I done, and why did I row? Well, its not due to an active sporting life as a child - I suffered from being a late developer, and therefore smaller than average, and also from a complete lack of coordination, short-sightedness, and a complete inability to catch a ball. So at schools that concentrated on football, rugby, cricket and nothing else, I was doomed to be the last picked on the team. This rather put me off sport for years, and at my first university I did next to no sports at all. However, at age 21 I realised that I was no longer able to eat anything I liked and never put on weight, and decided that I had to take up some form of exercise. Being the strange person that I am, I immediately went from one extreme to the other, and chose one of the most exhausting sports I could think of - on arriving at Warwick University to study for an MSc, I joined the rowing club.
Warwick Uni at that time was a little short on equipment - their boat house was an unlit, unheated shed with no running water in a field by the side of the river Avon, and downstream of the outlet from a sewage works. They didn't have any new boats that novices could use - it was a choice between a heavy wooden four or a heavy wooden eight for the novices. The latter didn't have an official name - unofficially it was called the Whale. The club was at a bit of a low ebb at the time - we were able to get together an eight to enter Worcester Head that February, which consisted entirely of postgrads and mature students. The youngest person in the crew was me, at 22. Surprisingly we didn't come last, and in fact did overtake another crew, although it was a schoolgirl coxed four.
However, my course took me away from Worcester after Easter, and a combination of this and the bad weather that winter meant that was the only time I represented Warwick at rowing. Fortunately, the place my course took me to was Cambridge
Living in Cambridge over the summer is a perfect opportunity for the aspiring rower. In deed, working 13 miles away from where I lived was actually seen as an advantage, because it meant I had an excuse to cycle 26 miles every day. As for the rowing, I decided to join the City of Cambridge. As there weren't that many novices around over the summer, I decided to learn to scull, and started on with a heavy, wide wooden yellow boat that probably to this day skulks somewhere in the boat house. My first outing went moderately well - I managed to get the boat moving and didn't fall in. This for a complete beginner is promising. Improivements came quite quickly, and I was soon able to go some distance without hitting the bank, and could take evasive action quite quickly when a college eight practising for the May bumps came steaming along at a high rate of knots with a psychotic maniac in the coxes seat. This wasn't always succesfull though - the third outing I had, I had to dive into a gap in the boats moored by the bank as an eight came screaming around the corner, and found that I had my blade stuck under a boat. I tried to pull it out, and felt the balance go, and, being a beginner, did exactly the wrong thing.
I let go of the oar
Fortunately, it was a nice sunny afternoon, and I was able to haul myself onto something that looked like a cross between a boat and a raft that someone was building. I was rather more cicumspect in my steering and balance as I paddled the now heavily laden boat back to the boathouse.
A dunking always provokes caution in a sculler, and although that can be a bad thing, it can also prevent too much overcaution. I stayed in the wooden boat for a couple of weeks after that dunking, but eventually decided to upgrade to one of the white Burgashells the club owned. For those not aware of these boats they have some very good features about them - they are cheap, and they are reasonably strong. In other words, the sort of boat that a novice can use. They are also rather slow, which means trying to race in one of them will put you at an immediate disadvantage to someone in a better boat. The first outing nearly ended in a complete disaster, the explanation of why requiring a diversion into an annual Cambridge event - the Strawberry Fair.
What this is is an annual event where a lot of crafts people gather in the meadows of Cambridge and sell things, while music plays, jugglers juggle, and kids scream at each other. There are also a lot of people altering their state of mind with a large amount of various plants, many of which are completely illegal. The main effect this has on rowers is twofold:
In fact, rather than lacking in club members, the club had grown rather rapidly, which meant that as a mere novice with only a years rowing experience, I was to row in the old wooden eight rather than the, well, old plastic eight. Actually, we occasionaly got the impression that the wooden boat was the better one as it was faster, but on the other hand it was also more likely to break, as it did during the Head of the River race. Halfway down the Thames, the gate of the man in front breaks, and his blade pops out. He gets it back in, and it does it again. And then again. Despite all this, and the stroke man catching two crabs at the finish when his feathering arm seized up, we still finished ahead of a couple of crews we overtook.
The plastic boat didn't do too much better though - they grounded it after the finish.
Doncaster head, being rather a smaller event, gave us a much better chance of winning. Actually, for the novice crew, it was guaranteed, as we were the only novice men's eight to show up. The senior3 eight, which I was also in due to the steady diminishment in numbers that always happens in University rowing clubs as people realise just how badly their work is going, actually had a race on its hands, with two other crews competing. Despite this, we won quite easily, and I collected my first ever prize for rowing - one of those little medal things with the rowers on. The average experienced rower has probably got hundreds of them.
Regatta season arrived with the BUSA championships. Sheffield, standing little chance of winning a race in the eights, decided to enter our best rowers in the single sculls - with the result that there were wins in the men's and women's novice sculls, and the women's championship sculls. More points were collected in other events, such as the men's novice four and the women's pair, but none in any where I was involved. Durham regatta was a bit more succesfull - the other four were on course to win until they were disqualified for not being at the start - despite the fact that they'd been stuck up the water waiting to be allowed down to the start for the previous ten minutes. In the other division, the four I was rowing with was doing well until we got pipped in the semis (I think). Also rowing in the eight, we drew Durham University in the first round - so we decided to try and scare them, and kept up with them for the first half before they pulled away.
As the summer comes, the undergrads go home, leaving postgrads like myself to consider either not rowing, going to the gym, or sculling. So, despite the occasionally choppy waters of Damflask, in July 97 I decided to get back in a scull for the first time since August the year before. And, to make myself practice, I decided to enter Peterborough Summer Regatta, although my previous experience of Peterborough earlier in the year wasn't marvellous - the four I was in won their heat easily, but lost in the next round when the wind picked up massively.
With nothing else to do but row in the evenings, I soon became a merely poor sculler, rather than completely useless. However, when the race at Peterborough came, I discovered my weak point - I couldn't actually scull in a straight line. Fortunately, I wasn't straight when they started the race, and by the time I'd pointed myself down the course and got away, the others had enough space not to be rammed by me when I drifted into their lanes. There were loud shouts for 'Sheffield' all through the race, but sadly they were from the umpire exhorting me to get back to where I was meant to be. And so ended my second season of rowing
September 1997 saw the return of the students, and an itake so large that the club packed up and left the freshers fayre half way through, as we wouldn't be able to get any more people out in boats. Naturally enough, we expected a large reduction in numbers as people realised it wasn't going to be sunny for long, and also as they decided they didn't much like carrying the heavy wooden boats that novices used down the steep bank to what little was left of the water in the dam from that summer. Yorkshire water still insisted it was more than 30% full - I didn't believe them.
As the rains came, the dam filled, and lots of people decide that rowing isn't fun in the cold and wet. So finally, we had few enough people to get them all into boats. As long as we organised things anyway.
to be continued...
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