The editor first heard of the project when Mr John Coates came to Monkton and borrowed a few old oars to test on something he was trying out in his garden... After having a go on the section of boat moored at Henley we signed up, saying the Monktonians would be interested in rowing in the ship when it was ready. Two years later, three members of our 1st VIII were mem- bers of its first British crew. The ferry from Piraeus carried us at a dignified pace past several very beautiful Greek islands, and after three hours we docked at the hillside island town of Poros, just off the Peloponnese mainland. The sun was sweltering, and we had only just avoided the summer's heatwave. As the main bulk of the crew disembarked and formed a conglomeration of oarsmen and women of all different shapes and sizes the BBC film crew brandished their vidoes and microphones at us. As we were led en masse along the waterfront, past brazen, curious tourists, and towards the naval base, we soon rounded a corner and were confronted by the warship, basking in her radi- ant splendour, sleek and low and threatening even when docked. This sight induced excited conversation from many, as although most of us had seen photos in the press and had read our books, none of us had as yet seet it 'in the flesh'.

For the rest of the day we were briefed on correct behaviour round the base, medical infor- mation and our short-term training programme; then we were let loose on the town, and most sampled the local cocktails to the early hours!

The next morning was the first outing. There was much clashing of blades and the sea was apparently well populated with crabs, as many were caught. On consecutive outings, however, things began gradually to improve. The pro- gramme for the day would be an early morning two hour outing, then lounging around for the day in the unrelenting sun until about five in the afternoon when we would do another two hours. We used the calm stretch of the Aegean sea between Poros and the Peloponnesian coast as our training ground.

The 200-strong crew was for the most part British, and a three quarter part was made up of Oxbridge oarsmen. We were to have been under the proficient coaching of Boris Rankov, the record-breaking former member and present coach of the Oxford VIII, but he unfortunately had to leave Greece with an injured back.

The Triereme , an Athenian warship whose design was later copied by the Romans for their Triereme, is propelled by 170 oars in three banks. In the top bank are the thranite oarsmen, in the middle the Zygian oarsmen, and below the unfortunate Thalamians, who, it seems to me, have the worst deal of all, rowing in the most cramped, sweaty and smelly po- sition! The oarsmen are very close-packed to allow the compact design of the ship, each oars- man's stretcher being attached to the bottom of the seat of the man in front, one rank below. It is for this reason that rowing a triereme takes such a long time to master, as the position of each man's oar is critical and only the Thranite oarsmen are able to see over the side of the boat. Above on the deck, and along the gang- way in between the two walls of oarsmen, are stationed the team coaches who keep a continual look-out for technical faults, oarsmen in difficul- ties and so on. A crab caught by a Thalamian could have very serious consequencies, as once the blade is lodged under the water and the other 169 oarsmen, unaware of the crab, conti- nue to row at full pelt, the Thalamian is pinned to the beam behind his head with the handle of the blade pushing hard against his Adam's Apple! For this reason every team coach carried a whistle which would be sounded at the sligh- test possibility of accident.... There were several dangerous moments and I, a Zygian, did not envy the Thalamian lot in the slightest!

The stroke itself was short and seemingly inef- fectual as there is little room in which each oasman can manoevre his blade; the hardest part of each stroke was not the stroke itself, but the recovery to 'front-stops' (although we were rowing fixed seat on sheep fleeces!) as the blade, having so much outboard, was exceedingly heavy to push down-and-away.

The warship had been built as a direct out- come of a long and extensive correspondence in The Times in 1975 concerning the ship's specifi- cations and performance. Since then the Triereme Trust' was set up which began by displaying a small section of the three-banked ship at Henley Royal and other regattas a couple of years ago, and then, after increased backing from private companies and a £500,000 grant from the Greek navy, designs were submitted to the Greek shipyard at Perama and building com- menced. Mr John Coates, the former British Defence Ministry naval architect (local to the Bath Area), designed and supervised the recon- struction of the triereme , relying on a life- time's research by Professor John Morrison, the Cambridge classicist. The warship, regarded by experts as a technological miracle of its time, is also considered to be a near perfect recon- struction of the original design.

The two weeks in Poros were used for the most part to record data on the specifications, speeds and general performance of the warship. The Greeks, it is said, were able to obtain a speed of 12 knots; we, 2000 years later and after two weeks of training, managed to attain a speed somewhere in the region of 8 to 9 knots which was not too bad; the two men who had made their dream possible, Professor John Morrison and Mr John Coates, were pleased, to say the least, with the crew's outstanding progress and the ship's impressive performance. After the two week stay in Poros the ship was towed to Pireaus where it was commissioned into the Greek navy in a ceremony and rowed by a com- posite Anglo-Greek crew for a further week.