Live obstacles [while rowing]:
Fishermen
Bad tempered, bait-throwing old men. Ever seen any women fishing ? Exactly. This is because they have more sense.
Kids throwing bricks/firing air rifles
Depending how socially deprived the area you row through is, the technology used to shoot at you gets more complex.
Swans
Savage is the only word for them. Attacking rowers is built into their genome.
Dogs
If they don’t chase your coach and try to eat him, they will jump in the river and try to chase the boat.
Drunk crusties
Usually only a hazard in the Cam, when the Strawberry Fair is on.
Cows
Yes, I do mean in the river. Certainly an occasional hazard on the Cam, but there was also a story on rec.sport.rowing about a cow falling off the bank into a passing boat.
Snakes
Not only a hazard if you row on the Amazon, but also in the Cam (well known tropical river).
Rowers
Who have fallen out of the boat. NB : this is not just scullers.
Natural hazards (drop one shot)
Twisty rivers
Racing boats are designed to go in straight lines. If you add to this the fact that often the person doing the steering is not actually looking where they are going, (this includes coxes : see Zigzag ) it’s remarkable that anybody gets round a bend at all.
Running aground
Running aground on the Thames Tideway, where there are lots of concealed shoals, is almost acceptable by comparison with attempted re-creations of the speedboat chase from "Live and Let Die". Regularly seen in Oxford and Cambridge in bumps racing
Bridges/moored boats/Buoys
The larger and more permanent the obstacle, the more likely rowers are to hit it.
Trees
That these are definitively a) on land and b) permanent did not prevent one Cambridge college VIII from ramming their boat so hard into a tree that it had to be cut free with an axe. Did the unfortunate cox get any sympathy from her fellow professionals ? No. Some of them are still recounting the story 15 years later.
Things that really do not belong in the water
I now understand how railway sleepers come to be so common on the Tideway (they formed the walls of many a now-rotting wharf), and I suppose that discarded condoms and bunches of flowers form part of the same natural cycles, but I would still like to know who bothers to go to Chelsea Bridge in the dead of night and chuck their office waste away when there's a perfectly good dump only metres from the shore.
Fridges
Enough said
Vehicles
Again, what you hit in the river is correlated with the degree of social deprivation. Hence in Cambridge, it’s mountain bikes, in Glasgow, burnt-out stolen cars.
