St Catharine's College Boat Club

Pugwash takes part in bumps. Things were learnt, things were lost, and things were caught. 

We made the meet time 12:30pm, an hour before marshalling, in order to have a chat and find out what happened in Cindies last night. at 12:45pm half the crew finished playing cricket. At 1pm we had the whole crew at the boathouse. Job well done I'd say.

There were no issues pushing off, which was a good start. There were also not too many issues rowing down the river to marshal, with only one crab. We then discussed how to make the boat go forward quickly from the start, and how to make it stop quickly when we bump the Robinson M3 crew later. Both of these are apparently key elements in the bumps format.

CUCBC, meanwhile, was having a slight shocker. We started 15 minutes late, there was a 4 minute gap between the 4 minute and 1 minute cannon, amongst other more minor inconveniences. Of course we ignored all that and concentrated on the more important things like plans for drinks after and pre-drinks before cindies tonight. 

Moderate carnage then occurred. There was a cannon, some rowing was done, but it was done so badly by the people in front of us that a cox was hospitalised. The Corpus crew behind us, styling themselves the "Banter Barge" decided to take advantage of the chaos and sabotage poor Alistair before the inevitable re-row. The rudder is now now somewhere in the Cam, if found please return to Capt. Pugwash. After much confusion, it appears we were given the row over, but as we couldn't re-row, we were then technically bumped by the Corpus "Snaky Ship". Chaos isn't, as I was led to believe, a ladder. It's a weird game of snakes and ladders but the board keeps changing. 

Now I'm no expert on bumps, but I know my way around Saturday Spoons and believe that a technical bump doesn't count, so we've now avoided spoons. Remember: It's Beers, Bumps and Blades in that order. We've nailed number 1, remain hopeful for number 2, and will have to put aside the dreams of number 3 for this year. 

Bow 6 then proceeded to row us home, whilst the stern pair attempted to steer by "taking the run". This took a very long time, especially since we then had to switch blades with m3 as they had m2's blades. Stuart was very anxious about giving us his crew's nice blades, but we looked after them really well and didn't get any water on the handles. 

Team morale was low, perhaps the lowest I've ever seen in the beer boat. Joke-to-stroke ratio was poor, at around 1:20. Then Zhao managed to catch a fish in his footwell. Due to the large amount of splashing that occurs during our rowing, it was quite happy in its new aquarium. This rejuvenated the crew, and got the chat flowing once more. Just in time, as the row home was dragging on a little bit as we pinballed along the cam unable to control Alistair. 

Crab to fish ratio - 1:1

All in all, an exciting first day somewhat marred by a poor result. We look forward to tomorrow and having another shot at it.