First Foray into South African Rowing

I just got back from my first rowing adventure in South Africa! I spoke with the guys briefly on Thursday, and then on Saturday Morning at the ungodly hour of 6:15 AM, they came and picked me up and we headed out...well, almost. I will never complain about Williams Crew being inefficient EVER again - these guys take forEVER and a day to do anything!! But eventually we figured out who was driving, where everyone was, and who hadn't woken up, and headed out for real. They train on the ergs ("ergos") during the week, and then on the weekend, get to row, since the place they train is an hour and a half away from campus. We're training right by the Misverstand Dam, a ways north of Cape Town, on a fairly bendy river, which is good, because it's their head racing season. They spent "winter" break at Henley in the UK (though they didn't do very well), and are gearing up for the South African Boat Race in a few weeks' time.

We got in four training sessions over the weekend, some better than others, and it's going pretty well so far. Since it's a guys' crew, there's a TON of power in the boat - we did a practice start today and I thought I was going to fly out of the coxswain seat! We've been doing lots of low rate stuff - 18-20 - but we're also trialling guys for the Boat Race, since there are nine potentials for the A boat and obviously only eights seats, so we did 3x 2K @30 this morning, and 6x 1' max power this afternoon (among other things). Surprisingly, the language hasn't been too different so far - there's stroke side/bow side for port/starboard and easy instead of weigh-enough (Wayne off, anyone?), and "checkpoint 1/2/3" - finish, hands away, bodies over. For the most part, though, it's been easy to pick up, and they aren't too sick of my American accent yet, especially since their last few coxes have been from the US. Apparently I'm around 7-10 kilos lighter than their last cox, though, so they're quite pleased with that, since for Boat Race there aren't any weigh-ins, so I won't have to carry weight.

I was a little dubious about rowing at first, but (despite it being horribly inefficient sometimes...RIGGING TOOK AN HOUR AND A HALF AND SWITCHES TAKE 20 MINS EACH) it's actually quite a lot of fun! The boat moves pretty decently, and I love head racing/turns/etc, so that's fun to get to do as well. We've got a race this coming weekend against Stellenbosch, but it sounds like Stellenbosch rowing is a little like Amherst rowing (this is UCT's version of the Little Three), and as such, we're doing it as a head race with the slowest crews going off first, so that the faster crews get some experience passing people to get ready for Boat Race.

Boat Race has got a rather cool format - it has heats and finals, but the heats are a traditional head race (6K), and then you're seeded into finals of two crews each. The final, then, is set up like the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, where it's on a 6K course with turns, bridges, and sandbars, but you go head-to-head. Apparently the last time UCT has won it was in 2001, but the crew has been doing really well this year and we might have a chance to make the "A" final, and even possibly win the thing! Exciting! It should be a tight, tight race, and I can't wait - we're headed to Port Alfred for the week-long spring break to train and compete.

It's a bit weird coxing guys, but it's also fun - a ton of power, and getting to say some ridiculous things as well. All in all, it was great fun to get back in a boat, and should be a good way to meet some South Africans, both guys and girls. The guys are super friendly, if a bit foul-mouthed, but they're fun, train hard, and are smart as well. I haven't met any of the girls yet really, since they didn't come up to train until Sunday, and then we went straight to the water, but hopefully in the next week or so I'll get to see them.

Boat Race is the last part of the South African season, so it's just through the first week or two of September, but it'll be a fun 6 weeks or so. As an aside, South African rowing is interesting in that it's still veryyyyy white - maybe even whiter than in the US - because everyone who rows at University rowed in private school before coming, so it's a sport that's unsurprisingly dominated by the wealthier classes. It's actually quite fun to get to talk to these guys about how school and things work here, just because it's totally different and since I'm not living with any South Africans, I don't really have access to a lot of conversation with them yet (though hopefully I'll meet some more through class and through SHAWCO, a student organization that tutors/brings healthcare to the townships).

In other news, my work with EPRI started this week, and was also quite cool - I'm working on a project about getting social protection aid to families in Uganda, and we've been working on a microsimulation model that allows you to set a percentage of the population that you'd like to target, and to assign points to various groups based on how important you think it is that they receive aid, and then it spits out various statistics on the number and percentage of households and individuals that will be targeted by your program. Cool, no? (If I'm SUPER lucky, I might even get to go to Uganda to do some more field testing...but that's only a very vague possibility. Fingers crossed!) I also got to go with EPRI into Khayelitsha, one of the townships around Cape Town, to field test a survey for the Child Support Grant. People were incredibly welcoming and friendly, as well as being very willing to answer some quite personal questions.

I'll write a longer blog post some time about townships in South Africa, because they're actually an intriguing phenomenon on their own, but I'm afraid that this has gotten too long already, so I'll leave you with another fun South African vocabulary word - "howzit" means hello/how's it going. :) No new pictures yet, I'm afraid.