The Club's Results

https://youtu.be/csTvKTmFU9w?t=373 A thriller - it'll knock your socks off...

Going in, we were not a particularly fancied crew, with the eventual overall Men's Bumpit winner kindly predicting spoons for us. We believed we were faster than Corpus M2 but weren't confident we could bump them before they would bump Clare M3. Kings M2 were likely to pose a serious threat as they had inherited a couple of M1 rowers displaced by blues. Of course Bomber told us to ignore all of this and simply row fast, as he always does.

The race was fairly routine until the exit of First Post Corner - we had moved to around 1 length from Corpus with Kings about 3/4 of a length behind us but rating significantly higher. However Corpus bumped Clare and cleared poorly which forced us into the trees in the Gut, caused several overhead crabs and knocking me out of my shoes and nearly out of the boat entirely. Bomber was on the verge of calling for us to stop and claim a likely technical rowover, but upon seeing Wolfson M2 who were described as something I can't repeat here, he decided the overbump was worth it. I fastened my shoes between strokes and made light work of Wolfson, gaining a length every 15 strokes and getting them on the Ditton entry. Not the way I expected to get my first bump but glad to have gotten it!

We moved to around a length on Caius but they seemed to be made of totally different stuff from earlier in the week and built a 2.5 length gap by the Railings. We managed to close a little but not enough, and the sight of our W2 cheering us on was clearly too much for some of us as "Yeah FaT" was promptly followed by "EYES IN THE BOAT THOMAS!". Luke called for a lift but after one stroke I realised nobody else was going with me and we soon wound it down. Not a perfect race from us but we don't think we'd have caught them even with our best rowing.

Slightly annoying to miss out on (technical) blades but up 4 is exactly 8 positions better than we thought we were going to get 2 weeks ago after a series of incredibly cursed IV outings, and the strongest performance from a FaT crew since 2017. Huge credit to Sam, Luke and Bomber for whipping us into shape and producing probably the most technical M3 on the river. The Strava data doesn't lie: today we were only a few seconds slower than M2 over the bulk of the course, and rather embarrassingly this is now the fastest boat I've been in, beating the segment times of Michaelmas M1. It's been great rowing with the crew and I hope to see many of them contesting M1 and M2 seats next term!