Punting

I have many guy friends who I know and later meet their girlfriends and announce to the guy that he has "outpunted his coverage." This phrase is, of course, based on the kind of punting that involves Martín Gramática and yardage counts. But, Oh my, there is another kind of punting that is common here in England.

I'm talking about this kind of punting: to propel (a small boat) by thrusting against the bottom of a lake or stream, esp. with a pole. The boat is canoe-like with a squared off front, which seats up to 4 well balanced people.

Punting is a lot of fun, I did it for the first time this past weekend. I think we had perhaps one of the most eventful punting trips ever. Just to name a few of the happenings:

a) We punted party boat style; we pulled up three wide and had a little wine and cheese picnic. (As shown above.)

b) We invented the wine shot. When you are actually punting (we theoretically took turns) you are using both hands, so you put wine in glasses with one gulp, take the gulp whenever possible, then continue punting.

c) We discovered that going upstream is about six to ten times as hard as floating downstream.

d) We also discovered that you should NOT go within two hours of dusk/punting place closing. It gets expensive to keep your punt past the opening times for the rental shop.

e) If your pole gets stuck, let it go. It will pull you in, and as it turns out they float anyway so you're not going to lose it.

f) Sometimes poorly mannered British people will scoff at you for not knowing which college you approaching from the river (there are over 40 college in Oxford, jerk lady).

g) Other poorly mannered British people may throw rocks at you once the sun has set and you can't see them to stop them or later identify them. The only way to make them stop is to curse at them in their own language.

h) Punting is much harder at night when the light is waning. In fact it might be easier to just step off to the shore and pull the punt by the rope while someone else uses to pole to make sure it won't crash into the walled sides of the river, and yet another person takes pictures of this whole event. (And the fourth takes a few hard earned wine shots.)

However, the important takeaway here is that all of these things together could have been a real disaster, but we had a blast for one reason: everyone had a great attitude. You could say that we literally outpunted our coverage, but I made some new friends and forged some stronger bonds. And I would definitely go again.

Around noon, upstream first, with a map.

Punting Haiku:

Punting means much more
than kicking a pig skin now.
Wine and friends and laughs.