Boating

by Walter Bradford Woodgate

There is also a good deal in knowing the boat which has to be steered. No two ships steer exactly alike. Some come round more easily than others; some fetch up into the wind more freely than others. In modern times it has been a common practice for builders to affix a movable ‘fin’ of metal to the bottom of a racing eight or four, under the after canvas, which fin can be taken out or fixed in at option. In a cross wind this helps to steady the track of a boat; but, unless wind is strong and is abeam for a good moiety of the distance, the draw of the water all the way occasioned by the fin costs more than the extra drag of rudder which it obviates for just one part of the course.

In steering round a corner a coxswain should bear in mind that he must not expect to see his boat pointing in the direction to which he desires to make. His boat is a tangent to a curve, the curve being the shore. His bows will be pointing to the shore which he is avoiding. It is the position of his midship to the shore which he is rounding that he should especially note. The boat should be brought round as gradually as the severity of the wave will allow. If the curve is very sharp, like the corners of the ‘Gut’ at Oxford, or ‘Grassy’ or Ditton corners at Cambridge, the inside oars should be told to row light for a stroke or two. It will ease their labour, and also that of the oars on the other side.

When there is a stiff beam wind the bows of a racing craft tend to bear up into the wind’s eye. The vessel is making leeway all the time; therefore if the coxswain on such an occasion steers by a landmark which would guide him were the water calm, he will before long find himself much to leeward of where he should be. In order to maintain his desired course he should humour his boat, and allow her bow to hold up somewhat into the wind (to windward of the landmark which otherwise would be guiding him). To what extent he should do so he must judge for himself, according to circumstances and to his own knowledge of the leeward propensities of his boat. To lay down a hard-and-fast rule on this point would be as much out of place as to attempt to frame a scale of allowance which a Wimbledon rifleman ought to make for mirage or cross-wind, when taking aim at a distant bull’s-eye.

Generally speaking a coxswain should hug the shore when going against tide or stream, and should keep in mid-stream when going with it. (Mid-stream does not necessarily imply mid-river.) Over the Henley course, until 1886, a coxswain on the Berks side used to make for the shelter of the bank below Poplar Point, where the stream ran with less force. The alteration (for good) of the Henley course which was inaugurated in 1886 has put an end to this, and both racing crews now take a mid-stream course. The course is to all intents and purposes straight, and yet it will not do to keep the bows fixed on one point from start to finish. There is just a fraction of curve to the left in it, but so slight that one finger’s touch of a line will deflect a boat to the full extent required. The church tower offers a landmark by which all pilots can steer, keeping it more or less to the right hand of the bows, and allowing for the increase of its parallax as the boat nears her goal.

Over the Putney water the best course has changed considerably during the writer’s personal recollections. Twenty years ago the point entering to Horse Reach, and opposite to Chiswick Church, could be taken close. The Conservancy dredged the bed of the river, and also filled up a bight on the Surrey shore. This transferred the channel and the strongest current to the Middlesex side. In 1866 a head wind (against flood tide) off Chiswick raised the higher surf near to the towpath, showing that the main stream flowed there. It now runs much nearer to the Eyot.

Also the removal of the centre arch of old Putney Bridge drew the main flood tide more into mid-river than of old; and since then the new bridge has been built and the old one altogether removed, still further affecting the current in the same direction. There is a noticeable tendency in the present day, on the part of all pilots, whether in sculling matches or in eight-oar races, to take Craven Point too wide and to bear off into the bay opposite, on the Surrey shore. The course should be kept rather more mid-stream than of old, up to Craven steps, but the point should be taken reasonably close when rounding; there should not be, as has often been seen during the last six years, room for a couple more boats to race between the one on the Fulham side and the Craven bank.

In old days, when Craven Point used to be taken close, and when the set of the tide lay nearer to it than now, there ensued an important piece of pilotage called ‘making the shoot.’ It consisted in gradually sloping across the river, so as to take the Soapworks Point at a tangent, and thence to make for the Surrey arch of Hammersmith Bridge. This ‘shoot’ is now out of place: firstly, because the tide up the first reach from the start of itself now tends to bring the boat more into mid-river off the Grass Wharf and Walden’s Wharf; secondly, because the Soapworks Point should now be taken wide, and not close. The reason for this latter injunction is that the races of to-day, by agreement, go through the centre arch of Hammersmith Bridge. Now the flood tide does not run through the bridge at right angles to the span. It is working hard across to the Surrey shore. Therefore, if a boat hugs Soapworks Point as of old, and as if the course lay through the shore arch, that boat will have to come out, across tide, at an angle of about 25° to the set of the tide, in order to fetch the outer arch and to clear the buttress and the steamboat pier. Year after year the same blunder is seen. Pilots, of sculling boats and of eight-oars alike, wander away to the Surrey bay off Craven; then they hug the shore till they reach the Soapworks foot-bridge, and then they have to cross half the tide on their right before they can safely point for the outer arch of the Suspension Bridge. A pilot should endeavour to keep in mid-river off Rosebank and the Crab Tree, and after passing the latter point he will, while pointing his bows well to the right of the arch which he intends to pass under, find the river move to the left under him, until, with little or no use of rudder, he finds himself in front of his required arch just as he reaches the bridge.

After passing the bridge a boat should keep straight on for another two hundred yards, else it will get into dead water caused by the eddy of the Surrey pier. At Chiswick the course may be taken wide (save and except, as in all cases, where force of wind alters circumstances). The main tide runs nearest to Chiswick Eyot. Horse Reach should be entered in mid-river; there is little or no tide on the Surrey point below it.

Making for Barnes Bridge, the boat should keep fairly near to the Middlesex shore—how near depends upon whether the race is ordained to pass through the centre or the Middlesex arch of Barnes Bridge. Once through Barnes Bridge, the course should sheer in (if the centre arch has been taken) until the boat lies as if it had taken the shore arch. It should attain this position by the time it breasts the ‘White Hart.’ The river is here a horseshoe to the finish. In linear measure a boat on the Middlesex side has nearly two lengths less to travel than the one outside it between Barnes Bridge and the ‘Ship.’ The tide runs nearly as well within sixty feet of the shore as in mid-river at this point, hence it pays to keep about that distance from the Middlesex bank.

The old Thames watermen who instruct young pilots over the Putney course are often inclined to run too much in the grooves which were good in their younger days, when they themselves were racing on the river. Their instruction would be sound enough if the features of the river had not undergone change, as aforesaid, in sundry details. The repeated blunders of navigation lately seen perpetrated by watermen as well as amateurs between Craven Steps and Hammersmith make us lose much faith in watermen’s tuition for steering the metropolitan course. We would rather entrust a young pilot to some active member of the London or Thames Rowing Clubs. These gentlemen know the river well enough as it now is, and are not biassed by old memories of what it once was but is no longer.