Wednesday was the first day of Lent Bumps for W1. It also was their first Bumps race for three of our crew members, making the day even more exciting. We arrived at the boathouse full of positive energy and determination. We knew it would be a tough day, but we were ready to fight! After a confident warm-up, a few decent practice starts and encouragement from President Barbara, we were finally ready for the race. After the canon went off, we had a solid start that propelled us at a good race pace, keeping Churchill W1 away. However, Churchill constantly reminded us every stroke counts by slowly gaining on us, getting one whistle on us after the first post corner. In the meantime, the distance between Girton W1 in front of us and our boat didn’t seem to shorten. We had a good rhythm and lengthened our strokes to try to reduce the gap. Suddenly, as we approached grassy corner, Christina said in the cox box she was about to overtake Girton! Everything went very quickly from there. As there have been no whistle for us, we were very confused to see Girton’s cox surrender. We then realised they made an unforgiving bad line on grassy corner and crashed their boat. Christina’s perfect steering finished them off: it is a bump!
Emma Roth, 7