St Catharine's College Boat Club

Bumps has so far lived up to its reputation and it’s been an eventful first two days for W2 this Mays. With two girls also rowing/coxing in W4, we’ve had to recruit a few subs to get us to the P+E where we can swap around crews – big shout-out to Michael, Matt and Georgie for helping us get there! 

The start of Day 1 did not exactly go to plan. After washing our boat down the night before, we had (stupidly) not put our seats back on the slides. A frantic scramble for seats then ensued and we quickly discovered that, in fact, not all of the seats are the same in our boat. Suffice to say it took a good while to fix the problem but we thankfully made it to marshalling on time, albeit slightly more stressed than anticipated. We made the crew change and it was heads in the boat, attempting to forget the woes of our seat drama. We were chasing Christ’s W2 with Emma W3 behind us. After seeing some of Christ’s practice starts, we were feeling quietly confident about our chances. The race went smoothly and we managed to get a bump on Christ’s before First Post Corner. The fun had just started at this point however as we somehow found ourselves witness to some classic bumps carnage with about 5 boats piling up in the middle of the river, all thanks to some slow clearing from Christ’s…

Going into Day 2 we were much calmer at push off, with the seat worries of the day before behind us. We managed a swift changeover again and everything seemed to be running smoothly. Today, we were chasing Medwards W2. We got to our station and although it was slightly breezy, we managed a good start and it seemed as though everything was going swimmingly as we quickly gained on Medwards W2 ahead of us. Our race was unfortunately cut short by an umpire accidentally sounding their emergency alarm, meaning that all the crews immediately had to stop racing. Any boat after station 8 in our division therefore had to re-row the race. We spun back and prepared ourselves, feeling assured by the gains we had made at the start of the first race. The race began, and about 30 strokes later ended in us bumping Medwards W2, yet to even reach our rhythm call. 

Two days, two bumps for Catz W2!

Day 1 - Catz W2 bump Christ's W2 and carnage ensues

Day 2 - Catz W2 celebrate a bump on Medwards W2