So, on rowing. Great fun, even though it is quite stressful sometimes with the dissertation, but early morning outings were not too bad actually. It’s a good start into the day. Our boat really formed a team throughout this term, and now we are all excited because of the bumps, the races on the River Cam.

The way this works is that about 15 boats line up on the Cam, one after the other with about one-and-a-half boat length between them. After the start, each boat tries to ‘bump’ against the boat in front of them while trying to avoid being ‘bumped’ by the boat behind them.

Yesterday we got bumped by a crew from another college, which means the two crews stop and get on the side while the race continues. The next day the two crews switch places in the line-up. So all crews which got bumped move down, all crews which were able to bump, move up.

There is however a third possibility, which happened today. The crew behind us got bumped from their boat behind them, which meant that there was a huge distance to next boat chasing us. The crew in front of us bumped the boat in front of them, moved to the site, so were chasing a boat that was about six boat lenghts away from us.

Normally bumps are over really quick. We were almost getting bumped because we ‘caught a crab’ at the start, which means that one of our rowers couldn’t get his oar (in rowing terms: his blade) out of the water on time. Because the boat moves forward and we sit backwards, this means that his oar was slammed into his chest and he had to really quick pull it out of the water and get back into the rhythm.

Normally if something like that happens, the crew is screwed, but we managed to recover, race away from our pursuer. However, at that time the two crews in front of us were already parking at the side of the river because of their bumps, but we still had to race all the way to the finish which was probably about two miles down the river.

This meant we had to continue in full speed for about 6 to 8 minutes, probably even longer. Now my arms hurt a lot, but it was a great fun. On the bank, people were cheering and screaming “Tit Hall” (the nickname for Trinity Hall”). Afterwards, time for cookies, a shower, and back to the computer for some work.

Yesterday we got bumped after about 1 minute into the race, today we were all a little bit gloomy. We star