Rowing team president Christian Ventresca kept track of the men’s eight at the I-Lan International Collegiate Regatta on the Tung-Shang river in Taiwan last weekend.

Day 1:
Surviving the flight and layover is one thing, but the three hour bus ride from Taipei to I-Lan turned out to be the hard part. Traveling with the Western women’s crew, and our rower friends from Milan-also women-helped us along. There was only one problem. Despite assurances from Air Canada that travelling with our oars would not be an issue, they never left Toronto.

Day 2:
Our first full day in Taiwan would turn out to be our most important. The regatta committee owns a fleet of 14 shells rowed only one week a year just for this race. They claim that all are equal but 6 of the 14 boats are made by an Australian boatworks and are so bulky and heavy that you may as well be rowing a picnic table down the course. Our coach went up to draw a boat with only four remaining, and a 50-50 chance of drawing the hated Aussie shell. With sweat building on his brow and our regatta on the line, Gary reached in the hat and pulled out a German-made Empacher, the best boats in the world. We all sighed in relief and went to go find the boat to rig it up. Now if only we knew where our oars were.

Day 3:
Since you haven’t seen anyone row yet all you can do is judge guys on how they look getting off the bus. Different guys look for different things. Some will check out the other team’s gear to see if they have stuff that can only be accumulated at international regattas. Others check out the fitness of other rowers by how much fat they are carrying around, if they are tanned from long hours of training on the water, and how they look in their form-fitted rowing clothes. Still others choose to help the Western and Milanese crews by scouting the women’s side of the regatta.

Day 3 continued:
Sometimes we wonder why Air Canada is bankrupt, then we remember how our oars have yet to show up and we get very, very angry.

Day 4:
We stepped on the scale of the official weigh in giddy with anticipation of our first sip of water and morsel of food that day. We kidded who was weighing in “fat” and applauded who was going low on the scale. Then the word came. We were overweight by a half-kilo per man, four kilos as a crew. The smiles and jokes disappeared as we readied ourselves for a possible sweat run. How could this be? The usual “porky” subjects were polled to see if they were at weight. Alexei? At his target. Dan, Abdallah? Fine. Even I was low on the scale. We checked the math and it was there we found the mistake. They had taken the average wrong-we were actually one kilo under per man and we pointed it out to the head official. Without even checking our math she just said “OK, you go fine.” Done and done.

The Men’s eight finished seventh in the B-final in Taiwan. They made it home, oars and all, but unfortunately left the Milanese behind.