Yesterday (24 May 2018, Wednesday) was the official start of Summer Eights, marking the beginning of 4 days of racing for students at Oxford University. As I explained in a previous post on last term's Torpids races, because the Isis river is quite narrow at places here and there are so many crews competing on behalf of their college the crews compete in a bumps race.
Credit: Chopper Photography
As the term and idea suggests, bumps races are exciting, fast-paced races. Because there is so little room for error, accidents do happen. Close to the end of the racing day yesterday, we got a big accident with the Merton College M2 boat crashing spectacularly into the Wolfson M2 boat, which had just bumped out and was stationary near the river bank.
This is a particularly big, and expensive, accident so it was lucky that nobody was injured from the incident.