Home > Rowing > Safety > Buoyancy > Why it matters
Click on any of the photos below for a larger version.
During the last session on Sunday, one Edinburgh University coxed four got into some difficulties, and ended up rowing the last 250 m or so completely swamped. We took some video of this from the opposite side of the course, and these are a couple of JPEG stills from that video. The quality's not great because the light was poor, and the camera was at a high zoom. There were two Umpire's launches and one of the course rescue boats immediately behind the four, but thankfully they weren't needed.
Looks like the bow and stern canvasses are more or less level with the water surface - but the boat doesn't seem to want to sink any further. Remember that this is a bow-coxed boat as well, so there's no buoyancy compartment in the bows, just a very soggy cox. Worth noting that had the cox been wearing a fully automatic self-inflating lifejacket (possibly even one with a hydrostatic trigger), it might well have inflated, leaving him potentially stuck in the boat.
Crossing the finish line is cause for celebration whatever the conditions...!
There's more discussion of this event in the rec.sport.rowing newsgroup.