Here’s a selection of our favourite videos of punting in Cambridge. By our, we mean, created by us…

How not to do it

Many years ago now, shortly after acquiring a couple of GoPro video cameras, we decided to go out and capture the essence of punting on the river Cam…

This was one of our early efforts, ironically entitled Cambridge Punting Carnage:

It shows a bit of a minor traffic jam near Trinity college as seen from Garrett Hostel bridge. Believe us when we say that this is nothing compared to what the river can get like on the busiest of weekend days, at the height of the season. We used the term ‘carnage’ with our tongues firmly in our cheeks.

Why are we posting about this now? To be honest, we’d completely forgotten about the video until we were approached by a TV production company. They wanted to licence it for use in a new show they were putting together; something to do with comparing punting with gondola rides (if we had a £ for every time someone had confused the two…).

Anyway, in the end we decided against allowing them to use it (so do let us know if you see this clip on a TV programme any time in the near future and we can send our legal team round, with their cricket bats and punting poles…) but we thought we would share it here, because, hey why not?

More recently, this time using a humble mobile phone camera, we captured some more footage that could easily fall into the ‘carnage’ category. This time, illustrating that self-hire (ie self drive) punting isn’t always the best option…

Please note, none of the onlookers hoping that he would fall in were anything to do with us and none of the punts involved was being skippered by any of our staff either.

This is how it should be done

For a far more relaxing approach to punting, here’s an insight into how it should be done

Hopefully this has inspired you to take a punt tour with us.