Remember how we rowed toward the cottage
on the sickle-shaped bay,
that one night after the pub
loosed us through its swinging doors
and we pushed across the shingle
till water lipped the sides
as though the loch mouthed ‘boat'?
I forget who rowed. Our jokes hushed.
The oars' splash, creak, and the spill
of the loch reached long into the night.
Out in the race I was scared:
the cold shawl of breeze,
and hunched hills; what the water held
of deadheads, ticking nuclear hulls.
The ‘race’ is the section of the loch where the water is dangerous, and therefore the narrator is scared. This is emphasised by the short, abrupt one line sentence ending with a  caesura . But there was more than one reason to be frightened, as the next few lines reveals. Did the poet have a premonition?
Crossing the Loch