Back then in those days gone by when I could get out of a chair without an involuntary groan, when I could plan ahead and didn't suprise myself by a fart and when i could sleep all night without having to pee twice... Yup, back then I was a young fit chappie and rowed for my University and Internationally.
This is just a short and true story of one such trip abroad. It was Berlin Regatta and since we were a bunch of impecunious students we'd figured out that the cheapest way to get there with all the equipment was to tow it ourselves. So we borrowed one student's dad's morris shooting brake. If you're old enough to remember them they were nearly all frosty green with timber bits on the side. Really they weren't up to the job. Well not up to the job of 9-up inside and a trailer with a sectional 8 and a couple of fours on the back with blades and luggage. So much so that on steeper hills we had to leap out and run alongside pushing and doubtless in contemporary times assorted nationalities of police would have arrested us.
Of course this is still cold war era and berlin wall and the East German Corridor. That's a good long stretch of Autobahn and after signing in, as we discovered later, the East Germnas kept a record of transit times. With our transport we actually got a bit of speed up on the flat... and then got a speed wobble on the trailer. The poor driver did his best but unknown to us all there was a bolt just given way on the towbar and the driver's best wasn't enough. The trailer ripped free and plummeted off the autobahn..
We were lucky. the trailer snagged in some undergrowth and the boats were undamaged; just a bent trailer and broken towbar. Our luck was in that shortly afterwards a local mobile welding guy pulled up and was happy to fix it preferng payment in our duty-frees rather than currency.
But this meant that our transit time in the corridor was prolonged so we met the full furore of East German border control at the far end. That was further compounded by one crew member stupidly taking pictures of the proceedings. It also get worse when the guards discovered one oar was rattling. They are made up of sections and there was an unimportant bit of loose old glue in there. But, yes, we were now accused of smuggling too. And they wanted to cut the blades open.
A very long debate later and everyone was tired and finally the guards got weary of the game. They settled for exposing all our camera films and impounding the boat and blades to xray and return to us later. That was important to us since at that level we'd all spoke-shaved our blades to individual grip and gearing and the boat had personalised adustments too.
We didn't know if we'd get the kit back in time for racing and certainly weren't going to get it back for training practice over the next day or two.
We made contact with a local rowing crew and got permission to borrow their stuff. Their boathouse was just outside the city on a lake. We duly turned up and adjusted one of their boats and blade sets close to our racing settings - a much harder gearing ratio than an average club oarsman would be using - and boated out for a training session.
On some rowing courses back then there might be a line of bouys to determine distances or ocassionally an overhead wire typically at 250m intervals. We're out on this lake plugging away when the cox spots a wire ahead. He decides we should go for a practice race start and race time over that section.
A rowing race start is intense stuff. The oarsmen are plugging away with heavy water as the boat builds speed, the cox is trying to keep an eye and coach and is taking rate timings ever 3 or 4 strokes and keeping the crew informed. It's all muscle memory and sheer brute force and noise - until the chatter of machine gun fire across the bow!
Yes, at one point in my life I was one of the 9 folk to ever attempt a crossing INTO east berlin by racing boat.
Topic: Nostalgic and true (Read 1842 times)
