An eventful outing
When I woke up this morning, it was raining. I walked to my lectures in the rain. But when I came out of my lectures, it was sunny! Pretty exciting. It was sunny for about 4-5 hours. Then, about 5 minutes before I had to leave for our rowing outing, it started to thunderstorm, of course, because we can’t possibly row when it’s not wet lately. I didn’t know what thunderstorms meant for rowing, but I knew rain didn’t mean anything, and there was a good chance that the rain might stop soon, so I headed down for the river anyway. I was soaked by the time I got there. My pants had become longer, sagging from being wet and muddy. But at least it wasn’t cold. By the time everyone had gotten down there, it had pretty much stopped raining. So we got out quickly because we had been delayed, and were trying to look decent because two Regent’s guys were coaching us. Simon, our normal coach, couldn’t come today. And with the Regent’s guys, we didn’t want to mess up because we would hear about it later. There’s always competition as to whether the girls or guys are better. (Definitely the girls this term.)
So we got out, did our warm-up and started going down the river, and something went wrong with Hannah’s footplate, so Ray tried to pull us into a raft (which means dock), but we didn’t do it soon enough, and we started to go towards the weir, which we haven’t done since one of our first outings as novices. Ray got us out of that, but then it was a little complicated to get back to the raft. We finally did, got the footplate fixed, and headed off again. Then we practiced a bunch of racing starts, and it was fine for a while.
Then, apparently Matt said something that made Emma, who is stroke now, mad. So in the next start, she went off really hard. She said it was because of this that Hannah caught a crab. I don’t know if that actually was the reason or not. The worst time to catch a crab (when your blade gets stuck in the water) is during a start because you’re really building up momentum, speed, and pressure, at a really high rate, so the blade can swing around really quickly and is hard to control. So Hannah caught a crab, and she tried to duck as it swung past, but she didn’t get low enough or didn’t do it fast enough, and her blade handle hit her smack in the middle of her forehead, which knocked her backwards so that the back of her head hit my blade handle. I tried to catch her head before it hit the bottom of the boat. I’m not sure if I succeeded. It happened really fast, and none of us really knew how to react. She laughed, the laugh that you do when you’ve just hurt yourself, and we all sort of did. But I know it had to hurt. And later she said she was seeing spots. I hope she’s okay. We went back soon after that, and she got out of the boat as soon as we landed.
Then we still had to get the boat into the boathouse. So Ray told Hannah to direct, and he took her place so she didn’t have to do anymore work. She kept saying she was fine, but I think it was good for Ray to help us bring in the boat instead. Except that Hannah doesn’t normally direct us, so it was a little confusing. And as soon as we got off the raft, and started toward our boathouse, another boat was coming out. So then we had to back up and wait, and then finally go in, so we were holding the boat for a while. And it’s pretty heavy. And Ray isn’t as tall as Hannah, so he didn’t hold the boat as high as she does, which doesn’t really matter, but it affected how I was holding the boat since she’s normally next to me. So we finally got the boat in, got out of the boathouse, and started back to college. We wear lycra, knee-length shorts for the outings and normally wear sweatpants over them. But all our pants were so wet that none of us put them back on. So I walked back in my lycra and my gilet, probably looked a little like an idiot, but hopefully more like a rower.