St Catharine's College Boat Club

Rowed Over

We knew today’s bump was going to be a tough one. We had Downing III in front of us chasing an abysmal Selwyn III boat. The row down the start felt hopeful and the practice starts were better than what we had done so far.

The bump wasn’t meant to be. Even though we started off at rate 40 and strode down to around 36,  Downing III caught Selwyn III extremely quickly, leaving Lara to steer around the two crews with very little room to maneuver. This turned out to be quite expensive to us. Clare III had bumped FaT IV behind us, leaving Trinity Hall III chasing us for the overbump. Having started off around 7 boat lengths behind us, they managed to close it down to around 5 before we reached Grassy.

This sent a wave of panic throughout the boat and the rowing got progressively spacky. However, after calming ourselves down a bit, we found our rhythm. The plan was to call for a second stride at the reach, but with Trinity Hall scaring the living daylights out of us, the rate never went below 32. After a controversial call by Lara who asked the very tired crew to think about the cookies waiting for us in the boat house if we rowed over, we pushed Trinity Hall back and rowed comfortably across the finish line. Bring on Selwyn III.