Putting in the practice

The promised cold, frosty but bright start materialised this morning, with a haze of early morning mist over the river, so I was pleased that I had made the effort to get out of bed early enough to enjoy it.

The local university rowing teams were hard at it when I arrived on the scene at 7am, despite the sun not yet being up.  The mixed 8 boat had stopped midstream and was being given a tongue lashing by the diminutive cox, who was making her views on their general shortcomings very clear indeed and ended up with a "I don't want to have to mention this again" to the silent crew who sat with bowed heads, looking rather dejected.  I didn't take a photo of the poor things, there being no need to compound that misery.

The coxless 4 in the main shot had the advantage of no cox shouting at them, but as you can see, it is not easy going -  although they were moving upstream at some pace at this point.  It looks as though they are about to run aground, but the river takes a long wide bend to the left at this point and they are on exactly the right line.

Many of the trees on this stretch of river were removed last year, on the grounds that they were old and potentially going to fall and block the river. But as a result one bank is strangely empty.  They have however left the occasional potential kingfisher perch, as you can see from the extra. There is a kingfisher on this stretch of water, but I didn't see him this morning.