rebellion
Active Member
Hi all,
Haven't been on in a while, and annoyingly this time my reason for posting is to complain
I was coaching rowing earlier on a fairly windy day, with a group of 6 totally new juniors, 5 in a Quad and 1 in a single, and as you can expect it was painful trying to teach them anything. The single managed to fall in after 20 minutes, the quad had no common sense to speak of, all in all a difficult group.
However all was going well towards the end of the session (they finally learnt how to go in a straight line...) until a passenger boat arrived on the scene. I saw the boat approach from behind (about 600m upstream at this point) and started to move the juniors across to the side of the river. As I was doing this however, the passenger boat decides that the best route for overtake would be on the inside, where I am directing my crews. No attempt at all was made to slow down the vessel (in fact one of the juniors was adamant it sped up), and whereas by now two pleasure boats had passed around the outside of the crews without any drastic changes to their route, this vessel continued to plough towards us. with 100m to go he sounds his horn to signal our intentions were unclear, to which I signal to the crews to get further into the bank. At 50m no attempt whatsoever was made to slow their boat, at which point I lose my cool and shout at the juniors to sprint into a tree, which they crash headlong into to avoid this boat, which throws on full astern 25m away, coming to a stop 2m to my side and nearly on top of the juniors.
At which point he shouts at me, then gestures obscenely at myself and the juniors. Thankfully no-one was hurt and the juniors' boat only had slight damage from ramming the side, but it was so close it could have easily been much worse.
Usually if an incident happens while I'm coaching I don't mind, as half the time one of the juniors did something stupid, but in this case I can honestly say I did everything I could to avoid collision, and this launch didn't. If they had slowed down earlier or maneuvered into the empty middle of the river it would have easily been avoided. Also the obscenities were most definitely not helpful.
Not a happy day on the river for me today...
Haven't been on in a while, and annoyingly this time my reason for posting is to complain
I was coaching rowing earlier on a fairly windy day, with a group of 6 totally new juniors, 5 in a Quad and 1 in a single, and as you can expect it was painful trying to teach them anything. The single managed to fall in after 20 minutes, the quad had no common sense to speak of, all in all a difficult group.
However all was going well towards the end of the session (they finally learnt how to go in a straight line...) until a passenger boat arrived on the scene. I saw the boat approach from behind (about 600m upstream at this point) and started to move the juniors across to the side of the river. As I was doing this however, the passenger boat decides that the best route for overtake would be on the inside, where I am directing my crews. No attempt at all was made to slow down the vessel (in fact one of the juniors was adamant it sped up), and whereas by now two pleasure boats had passed around the outside of the crews without any drastic changes to their route, this vessel continued to plough towards us. with 100m to go he sounds his horn to signal our intentions were unclear, to which I signal to the crews to get further into the bank. At 50m no attempt whatsoever was made to slow their boat, at which point I lose my cool and shout at the juniors to sprint into a tree, which they crash headlong into to avoid this boat, which throws on full astern 25m away, coming to a stop 2m to my side and nearly on top of the juniors.
At which point he shouts at me, then gestures obscenely at myself and the juniors. Thankfully no-one was hurt and the juniors' boat only had slight damage from ramming the side, but it was so close it could have easily been much worse.
Usually if an incident happens while I'm coaching I don't mind, as half the time one of the juniors did something stupid, but in this case I can honestly say I did everything I could to avoid collision, and this launch didn't. If they had slowed down earlier or maneuvered into the empty middle of the river it would have easily been avoided. Also the obscenities were most definitely not helpful.
Not a happy day on the river for me today...
