Here's a neat hack from that inventive spot where a coach's desire to fix older equipment intersects with an inability to throw anything away: taking all the old erg bungees you wind up with when you re-fit your ergs for another long winter and using them as, well, bungees all over the boathouse.
(This hack presupposes, of course, that you are upgrading your erg bungees from time to time, but that is a relatively easy bit of maintenance that keeps your ergs humming along--and the more meters and more teams that the ergs see at your place from year to year, the more useful this upgrade becomes.)
The bungees you liberate from the erg in this process are long, and they still have plenty of stretch even after they've logged a few meters too many inside the erg. You can cut them down for standard bungee tasks, like bundling riggers or seats, but they are most useful if you leave them long. In their "natural state," they are long enough to stretch across the bed of your trailer, making it easy (and cheap) to secure oars, slings, tents and anything else that gets hauled along to the race course.
We like this last use best, and that is where we spotted these hack in the first place. Given how important it is to really secure everything in the bed of your trailer these days, having some long, and stretchable, tie-downs that you didn't have to pay for can really come in handy. Sure, lots of folks use boats straps (though a 12 footer is barely long enough and two 9's leave a lot of slack on most loads) and you can buy a cargo net that you might be able to untangle after a few tries, but once we saw how quickly you can bungee everything in place with these long, salvaged cords, we were sold.
Depending on how you want to use these "found" bungees, you may need to do some extra hacking to add hooks or knobs to the ends, but that is easy enough, and we are willing to bet you will just keep coming up with more things that could get the "bungee-treatment" once you have a heap of these lying around.
Got a great re-purposing trick of your own? Share your tips--and hacks--in the comments below.
Have a great rowing hack to suggest for future inclusion here? Send it to us!