St Catharine's College Boat Club

At 0930 (or thereabouts) on the morning following BCD, eight rather hungover members of The Boat Club (and James, who kindly subbed in) assembled on West road to board a coach to Oxf*rd. After what can only be described as the worst coach journey of our lives, we found ourselves at the front gates of our sister college, Worcester, along with an assortment of other Catz sports teams. Here, we would take on our rivals from the other place at everything from men's netball to mixed lacrosse.

In an attempt to build bridges with the rest of college, who on average are *slightly* younger than our crew, we decided we would try our hand at netball. This went badly, so we decided we would just stick to casually kicking a football around. This also went badly. Irritated that all our aerobic base training had done absolutely nothing for our hand-eye coordination, we gave up and went to spoons, where we had brunch and complained about being hungover.

We were due to meet at the Worcester boathouse at 3pm, hence why at exactly 2:45pm a huge hailstorm arrived. After suggestions that we should just ditch the rowing and watch rowing videos instead were reluctantly refused, we battled through the hail to the concrete jungle that is the row of Oxf*rd boathouses. After the raising of the Worcester flag we were ready to race.

Mercifully, the hail relented for the rowing. Unfortunately for W1, however, this made little difference to the outcome of their race. The margin: 3 lengths to Worcester. (this may in part have been due to the sub that Worcester had provided for W1 being unable to put the flat bit in the wet bit).

The playing field for the men's race did seem to have a slight hill at Worcester's end as well, however, as we lined up in our slightly bendy Janousek from '93 against Worcester's wing-rigged Empacher. We had heard (from them) that they were a fast starting crew, so we gave it some beans off the start... and crashed almost immediately. Recovering from the clash of blades better than our Worcester counterparts, we squeezed in front, and despite rowing almost exclusively with our backs and arms held the lead past the first boathouses. Here, in spite of 8 hangovers doing their best to drag us backwards, we extended the gap and cruised home with a two length advantage.

All in all, a great day out. We're looking forward to a rematch on the Cam next year.