Report by Zach Lande:
The 22nd November 2015 was a big day for team Homer aka “the Homies”. On this bright, calm, but absolutely freezing morning we woke up to the news that Marcelo’s wife was going into labour. We are now extremely proud to welcome Helena “Homer” R. to the team. It was also Sergio’s birthday, but we were a little more excited about the baby. In order to replace Marcelo, we had to enlist the help of the brilliantly buff bowsider that is Tom “Big T-bone Steakison” from team Marsh. As we all congregated at the boathouse, we came to the realization that our costume idea hadn’t really worked out. Our theme was supposed to be “Sports” (except for rowing), but in our collective sports gear we just ended up looking like a bunch of rowers.
Our first race was against Hughes Hall. This was our first opportunity to put into practice our intense training; we had cut our fingers to pieces in The Lord Protector during our work on race starts, and hopefully wanted to avoid catching any unwanted crabs. Unfortunately, this was not the case. To quote Eazy-E, Tom caught “more crabs than a seafood platter”, but this was because his feet kept on slipping out of his boat shoes. However, we achieved a very convincing victory despite this setback, and confidently made our way into the quarter-finals. We had a short while to recover, during which we drank tea, ate Haribos, listened to Trinity 1st and 3rd playing “last Christmas” on their cox box, and even considering going to the pub for a cheeky pre-race pint.
After Lois had sacrificed the drawstrings of two of her bags in order to tie down Tom’s slippery feet to the boat, we lined up against Caius and gave them an intense stare down, still on a high from our previous victory. Caius had a very good start, and began to pull in front, but Jess’s motivational coxing carried us ahead of their boat. A surprise appearance from an unwanted crustacean in the Caius boat caused the last 50 meters to be neck and neck, as we clashed oars in a desperate thrust towards the finish line. As the two boats glided under the bridge together we hurriedly turned towards the marshals for a decision. Upon hearing “Sidney won”, the entire crew erupted into loud cheering and applause. To quote Rob, our inspirational coach, it was “the most epic race I ever watched”. Rob was also very keen to point out that he had matched with the Caius coach on tinder. Well done Rob.
The semi-finals were against Magdalene. This was a particularly tough race, which ended in a loss for the Homies. Nonetheless, we still had the 3rd and 4th playoffs to go against Wolfson, who looked particularly appeeling in their banana costumes (pardon the pun). The Homies were fatigued from their last race, and had to dig deep in order to rapidly spin the boat and line up for their final race of the day against the bunch of Wolfson rowers (yes, that was another banana-related pun). The Homies truly emptied out, but couldn’t quite catch up with Wolfson. Nevertheless, we placed 4th overall in the M2 division, which is an incredibly impressive result, of which we are all proud. We would like to thank our coaches Rob and Chad for all their time, dedication, wise words, and for putting up with our incessant demands for extra outings. Hopefully the Homies will see equal, if not more success in Fairbairns in December!
