> I am a lot happier about the rowers since we hit one amidships. It stopped
> rowing in front of us. It just skimmed across the water with no damage at
> all. I had rushed to the front of the boat expecting to be pulling people
> from the water.
Last Month, I was coming downstream around the islands between Marsh
Lock and Henley Bridge. There were a couple of rowing skiffs? on the
river, one right by one of their landing stages, the other three
quarters of the way across to the island. I slowed right down, aiming to
pass neatly between them, rather than try and go around the outermost
one. When I was somewhat less than 50 yards away, a man on the bank
started jesticulating and pointing to the outer boat. Yes, I thought,
I've seen him, I'm not going anywhere near him. Then I spotted that the
two boats were tied together with about 100 feet of blue polyprop rope,
which was floating on the surface of the river. I went into hard
reverse, but still caught the rope. The chap in the right hand boat was
hanging on to the landing stage, but when the rope went tight, the
other boat shot back and did a good impression of a submarine! I
managed to stop before getting to the end of the line and demolishing
the boat, but had to contend with the chap from that boat swimming to
the back of my boat to be rescued. Managed to persuade him to stay away
until the boat had stopped (didn't really want him around the prop),
and then hauled him out of the river. Can any rower explain what they
might have been doing with the boats tied together like that? I felt
that if they needed to do that they should have arranged for an
exclusion zone on the river to prevent this sort of incident from
happening. Luckily, no damage was done to their boat, but I'm not sure
it would have been my fault if there had been damage.
Terry Streeter
NB Arun - Cassiobury Park
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