So woke up at 5am this morning to get the bus for rowing.

Arrived at Boathouse. Crew was late and the crew senior to us had stolen our boat, so we ended up going in random, unknown boat from our sister medical school boat. Didn’t even have time for a proper warm-up.

Start marshalling. A hundred two boats, strong wind, low tide, strong stream. You need a decent fucking set of marshals to sort out all the crews, especially with a lot of non-Tideway, novice coxes, novice crews. In short, that did not occur, and it turned into the biggest fucking clusterfuck of the century. Where we should have been line astern with a length and half between boats, we had three boats abreast getting squished into the stupid shoals, coxes going absolutely fucking apeshit at each other. Ended up nudging the bank with my stern because if I had gone forward, WE WOULD HAVE T-BONED ANOTHER FUCKING BOAT. I was like,

 

So we manage to turn, after taking some crap from a cox steering fucking OAPs, and begin the race.

It quickly becomes clear my rudder is not responding. I manage to remain calm, but inside I was all;

We go down the whole fucking course and the row back without a fucking rudder. How did we steer? I STEERED WITH MY FUCKING HANDS, and power-steered by talking to the crew. Which on the one hand is a little;

But is mostly just a fuckload of;

Some wag of a rower, upon hearing my chat to my crew (consisting mostly of stroke side harder, bow side hard, x 1000000) , thought it was okay to yell,
“‘ere, have you thought about being a race commentator?”

Which normally I would have lol’d at, but I was just all,

So yeah, we survived, the boat’s in one piece. I was convinced I had taken off the rudder, so imagine my relief when we go to heads and it’s still there, in one piece, not even jammed. What had occurred? A fucking nut on the steering assembly had come loose. So the lack of steering wasn’t even my fucking fault.

 

Feeling only just returned to hands - every part of me was soaked with shitty Thames water. Had a shower, came home, passed out in bed.

Conclusion?

 

Although. My crew was 3/4 novices, and we entered an IM3 category, the same one as our TOP boat. I was expected to get totally spanked, and with the steering issues was expecting to get spanked even totally harder. However, we still came 11/15, which all things considered is pretty ok.