One story from our Henley experience: In our semi final match at Henley vs St.Pauls, we launched in plenty of time for the start but found my ore lock completely loose after a few hundred yards. We raced back, frantically found the Brown coach with tools, tightened the lock and got down to the start just as time ran out and we were to be disqualified. Needless to say, we had "raced" down. Turned around and were ahead of St. Pauls at the 1500 m mark when we drifted to starboard and that side raked the top of the floating boom with all oars. Our half length lead turned into a quarter length deficit and that is how the race ended.
When we all got together again at our 20th reunion in '86, we met with
Charlie and rowed again. To our surprise, he didn't even know about our
hitting the floating boom and how that cost us the race. We were so
disappointed, no one had bothered to tell him!! Another strange thing was
no one ever saw or spoke to our cox, John Dewey, again after that summer!!