Vikings at the Great River Race

I looked at this thing at the start of the Great River Race and felt very thankful I wasn't going to to be rowing it. The problem is that if you are slow, you miss the tide and spend the last hours battling the ebb+current. They had to be towed to the finish line, I think. It needed a crew of hardened Vikings fuelled by mead and lust, not a bunch of re-enactors that work at desks all week.
Incidentally, those holes in the gunwale are the original 'row-locks', I am led to understand. The Y-shaped jobbies in Gladys are technically called crutches, and the square ones are called swivels.