Rowing, but really cavalier sculling

I tried the university 'Rudern Kurse' last Tuesday, rowing class in English. Which turned out to really be a sculling course since they always use two oars. It was innnnnteresting to say the least. I knew it was going to be a little different when a guy standing next to me in the boathouse stripped down right there to change into his scrappy rowing clothes as we waited for all the other students to assemble. This guy, in his 20's, turned out to be not only my instructor, but also the head of the whole program.

I hadn't been in a boat in about 14 years, since the early 90's when I took a summer course with River City Rowing in Sacto and then helped start the first rowing team for my high school partnered with the local university. Sure, I'd been doing lots on the ergs, the rowing machines, had done the C.R.A.S.H.-B's in Boston many times (even post-tendon issue in '06), and spent 5 years in the early '00's racing 6-man outrigger canoes on Boston's North Shore and elsewhere - but I hadn't been in a racing shell for a long while. I expected it to be different from the 90's, and I expected to have to learn a lot of new German vocab. I had no idea HOW different it would be!

I really thought it was a joke when an instructor asked us to wheel out an old wooden hulk of a boat with rusty riggers. My jaw was on the floor when a battered wooden rudder was tossed to a student to carry down to the dock. Clunky, wooden, square shafted oars were handed out and taken down as well. By now I knew it wasn't a joke and I was worried, and I hadn't even seen the inside of the shell with is circa 1934 leather straps for footstretchers and the circa 1957 plastic sliding seat on rusty slides.

After putting the boat in the water - in which can only be described as the most awkward process ever - it already began to take in a bit of water. We put her in like a canoe. Sort of. None of the clean up-on-the-shoulders, roll down, put in method I'd had drilled in my head back in high school. There was no instructor bobbing alongside in a seperate launch shouting through the megaphone. It goes without saying the wooden hulk had nobody sqwawking through the coxbox to speakers hung under each seat. Instead, my instructor stood up, tied a blue plastic rope to his waist and to the rudder, hovered above us, and sputtered directions in German. Below is another boat coming in, their coxswain doing the same thing:
We'd had the equivilent of 45 seconds of basic instruction on the dock before we got in. 2 of the 4 in my boat had never rowed before, one of which has about as much boat-German as I do. I honestly think I spent the whole hour in shock - mainly about the boat and safety issues, but also the new vocab and ever-increasing amount of water that was accumulating in the bottom of the boat.

Feathering a clunky wooden blade is tough, put it at the end of a square shaft and you have noisy and difficult rowing. Toss in a few newbies and a rusty rower and you have a full-on rhythm stick orchestra with all the out of sync oars banging into each other. I had recalled disliking 4-man boats and hating sculling - rowing with two oars -but "I HATE sculling!" was running like a mantra through my head. Tired of catching crabs, being misunderstood, and banging my thumbs, I wanted to die, but more than that I wanted to get this creaking, sinking barge back to the dock and go home and take a shower.

We eventually made it back to the dock. It was raining lightly and we had to pull the boat out of the water and flip it because the instructor thought it was taking on more water than usual. A full 2 gallons or so of water splashed to the ground when we put it on a pair of sawhorses. I was appalled, but only to be moreso when the program director came out with a roll of duct tape to patch the split once he found it. Here below you see him looking for the hole:
Next week we're supposed to practice going out in singles. I hate singles b/c my balance is so bad and it's just not a good combination. The prospect of flipping and getting stuck in mud and maybe leeches is not a fun one. There's also the two-oar thing and having nobody to direct you, especially on an unfamiliar little river. I'm debating whether to go back or not. I haven't paid the 35 euro for the class yet, that's next week. I'm pretty sure one of the 2 friends I signed up with is going to drop the class. Being in a boat is nice, but I'm not sure if this situation is worth it. I want to look into the rowing club on the other side of town. They're supposed to have 8 man boats and a little boathouse workout room with ergs. I think that might be more my thing.

Just to put my whining in context: my training boats were the heavy old fiberglass jobs retired from university's use in the 80's. Even in the early 90's the reject training materials were dreamy compared to the boat I had on Tuesday, which looks more like it should be decorating a T.G.I.Friday's than used for university rowing classes.