Five minutes before the getting-on race, the coach of the Clare boat set to start behind us walks over, trailed by the yapping dog that follows him on all of the crew’s outings. He announces that he has a “particularly meaty group of boys” this year, that he expects to overtake us on the reach, and that we should be prepared to follow his instructions from the bank to ensure the safety of his crew as they pass. Unsure quite how respond to such brazenness, we sit mutely in our parked boat. After he turns around I mutter something about drowning the dog. Shortly thereafter the dog falls into the water and has to be rescued, the race begins, Clare fails to overtake, and we qualify for the Lent Bumps.
The first day we row over. The lead-up to the race progresses much faster than I expected: nerves contract the apparent passage of time between the muffled thud of the four-minute cannon and the one-minute. I’m so impressed by the sight of a row of boats being synchronously poled out to the end of taut chains that I nearly miss the thirty-second warning. The slide to front stops at twelve, the square at eight, the check at five and the starting cannon all seem to happen simultaneously.
We gain half a length on Darwin II, and our first whistle, almost immediately. We raise the pressure, hoping to overtake quickly, but progress no further; less than a kilometer into the race Darwin overtakes the Emmanuel boat they’ve been chasing, and we’re left frustrated and spent with half the course still to go. I’ve experienced few things more excruciating than that final push, utterly wasted by the initial sprint but forced to keep rowing in order to hold our station.
Our rivals from Clare (this rivalry may be entirely one-sided but by now we despise the coach enough to make a tradition of it) bumped on day one, and start immediately behind us the second day. We know we can catch Emma faster than Darwin did, so the day’s task is to bump them before Clare bumps us. We resolve to make it a short race, and hold the rate perilously high after the initial windup. Immediately we get one whistle, then two, then three. Our form disintegrates, and for a terrible moment it looks like Emma will slip away. But fifteen more seconds of half-crazed wrenching at the oars ends the whistling, and we arrest ourselves midstream as Clare coach and Clare pooch whiz by screaming expletives. We limp to the side of the river, drop our blades, and cheer. The coaches rip ivy from the side of the tow path and we wrap ourselves in it, rowing home wreathed in a parody of laurels.
As a spectator on Grassy Corner I can’t believe I’m watching the same sport. The wait between each of the three guns drags on, and after the final cannon-blast nothing happens. Slowly, the sound of bank parties disentangles itself from the rumbling of traffic on the motorway bridge, then builds, then bursts into a roar as boats and bicycles materialize suddenly around the bend in the river. There’s a minute or two of perfect madness as coaches scream by, boats couple and separate and frantic blades send fountains of water into the air. Then, as quickly as it began, it ends. The surface of the stream flattens and the sound dies away as the race moves on down the river.
The next day disaster strikes: as we begin to pull away from our opponents, a complicated sequence of events near the front of the boat results in the bodily ejection of one of our rowers. Facing the other way, I see nothing—there’s a jolt, then a head in the water, then panicked shouts of “hold it up!” The Emma crew, only inches from being bumped by Clare, is awarded a technical bump against us and we return to the previous day’s starting positions.
We never recover, and shortly after the beginning of the fourth race Clare bumps us.