Raining on the Regatta

It's the Shrewsbury Regatta weekend - I know very little about rowing and usually my main conclusion is that the boats look very narrow and it's surprising they don't capsize more often - I guess the oars do a lot to improve stability. Anyway, this weekend hundreds of boats, and the teams that use up, turned up to compete. Last year the event was cancelled due to flooding. This time the weather was not consistently kind to them, as spells of warm sunshine would suddenly give way to intense downpours of rain and hail, to the extent that the competitors wouldn't have been much wetter if they had fallen in. With that admirable sporting spirit I completely lacked at secondary school they perservered despite the weather, although I'm not entirely convinced they were all enjoying themselves. I took shelter under a bridge and got round on to it just as the rain was easing off for a bird's eye view of the rowing.