St Catharine's College Boat Club

Today marked the end of the spoons campaign. This disappointed many members of the crew, who still associated "spoons" with the fine* drinking establishment on Regent Street.

* Fine in the "adequate" sense of the word.

After the almost-success of yesterday's attempts to confuse crews by dressing as the university hockey team, we decided the tactic could work with some refinement. To cause maximum chaos, it was decided to make the boat as ambiguous as possible. The result, a combination of stash from 8 different colleges, was a glorious break from the status quo of matching stash. 

From left to right: Peterhouse, Robinson, Sheffield Uni, Jesus, Catz, Newnham, Newnham (honest), Johns', Corpus.

This was a huge success. Spectators had no clue what was going on, and all the crews we rowed past couldn't work it out either. Unfortunately the umpires didn't rise to the bait, that would have been more interesting. I've got no way of telling if CamFM were reporting even more confusing stuff than usual. In any case, we were successful in causing minor discomfort to surrouding crews. Great success!

A cannon went off, some rowing occurred. Then a bit more rowing - a new sensation to us after the short races of the last two days. Unfortunately carnage still occurred, a combination of our friends at Corpus and Swoods' dad holding up the river just ahead of the Clare crew we were slowly catching. Unlike day 1, there was no re-row. Instead we were awarded a technical row over. It was almost disappointing, with a bump definitely on the cards for us. 

But it wasn't just an improvement in the result, it was vastly better as a crew. This surprised the coaches - apparently it's not normal to see these kinds of large changes in a boat during the bumps campaign? 

Onwards (and perhaps upwards) as we go into the last day of bumps fresh after Hawks and Robinson's balls tonight. Something tells me the Clare and Peterhouse crews around us won't be drinking, but we'll just have to prove that alcohol has no detrimental impact on rowing. Plan has already been made on the one final improvement to the dress code, I think we've got it nailed now.