Rowing

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. FIRST LESSONS ON SLIDING SEATS. Let me assume (I am still addressing my imaginary novice) that you have passed through the first few stages of your novitiate. If you are an Oxford or a Cambridge freshman you will have been carefully drilled in a tub-pair, promoted later to a freshmen's four or eight, and during the next term may have been included in the Torpid or Lent-Boat of your College. At any rate, I am assuming that you have by now rowed in a race or in a series of races for eight-oared crews on fixed seats. But I prefer to leave the general subject of combined rowing, whether in eights or fours, to a later chapter, while I attempt to explain the mysteries and difficulties of the sliding seat. The slide may be described as a contrivance for increasing the length of the stroke (i.e. of the period during which, the oar-blade remaining covered in the water, power is applied to the propulsion of the boat), and for giving greater effect to the driving force of the oarsman's legs. Long before the actual sliding seathad been invented professional oarsmen and scullers had discovered that if they slid on their fixed thwarts they increased the pace of their boats, and even amongst amateurs this practice was not unknown. Mr. R. H. Labat has told me that so far back as 1870 he and his colleagues fitted their rowing trousers with leather, greased their thwarts, and so slid on them. In 1872 slides were used at Henley Regatta, and in 1873 the Oxford and Cambridge crews for the first time rowed their race on slides, Cambridge winning in 19 mins. 35 secs., which remained as record time until 1892. This performance, though it was undoubtedly helped by good conditions of tide and wind, served to establish slides firmly in popular favour, and from that time onwards fixed sea...