A Stroke of Lightness

We laugh a lot on our trips, mostly when we are off the water, for safety reasons. Clearly rowers love to laugh because many of you loved our hilarious Keeping Up Appearances post on Facebook (above) in case you missed it.

For those reasons, we’ve compiled what we think are a few interesting but completely non-serious bits on rowing to cheer you up. We dug deep to find lore you haven’t seen before.

In this Buster Keaton clip, The Rowing Race, Keaton gets an opportunity to be coxswain and comes up with an ingenious solution for the rowing team’s challenges.

This appealing clip from 2015 shows like a winning ad. It covers a prestigious annual race between two universities in Zurich—University of Zurich (ZH) and Poly (ETHZ)—in a fun way, displaying the challenges of transporting shells through the streets, on cars, stairways, funiculars and more. This year, the universities will be competing for the 66th time.

Rowing Limericks          

We once did a post with a rowing haiku. We thought we were being clever. It turns out the folks at Twickenham Rowing Club beat us hands down with both haiku and limericks. Enjoy.

Image credit – Hear the Boat Sing

  

Rowing Films

Our friends at Hear the Boat Sing have a comprehensive list of rowing films.

But, if your ambitions are greater, back on the Twickenham site, you’ll find a section on how to make a rowing movie. Requirements include people who row, a hero and an anti-hero. Hey, we can make a movie on our next trip! How hard can it be?

While we are at it, let’s sing. This is a list of songs whose lyrics have been adapted, by rowers, making them appropriate for fun rowing singalongs that are far more creative than Row, Row Your Boat. Rowing the World has settled on The Wild Rover, changed to The Wild Rower, by the Dubliners, for our next Ireland weekend. We’ve included the real thing above and the refrain below for your practicing pleasure.

And it’s hands then body (don’t bend those legs)
Gaining length off backstops
I’ll not play the wild rower
No nay never no more

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Ruth Marr

Ruth Marr

Ruth Marr is the founder and President of Rowing The World™ and The Rowing Concierge™. Ruth started rowing as a graduate student in Saskatoon and has been a long time member of Prairie Fire Rowing Club in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She has enjoyed rowing in dozens of beautiful destinations around the world, both on the trips that she operates and on other rowing travel experiences such as FISA World Rowing Tours and private tours organized by friends.

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