The Club's Results

To add a note of lightness to Imogen's painting of gloominess in rowing form, the rowing and racing was the best sat I can remember the boat being; this came as a complete shock.

Post marshalling, we did a little practice start, during which we hit about 42 despite having seat/costume interaction malfunctions. I thought this boded well, and so it did. Clamming up immediately before the start so we could fit as many strokes as possible in the short race we eyed up our opposition. Pretty much everyone in our boat had been rowing that morning as part of genuine training and we had spied the Downham boat out there cheating in a despicable fashion. They looked kind of big so we argued for as much of a head start as we could, got half a length thanks to Julia's excellent bribes, and then paddled off down the course at a sedate 40 which gradually slipped.

A good healthy 500m later and we finally pushed across the line about half a length in front; thank you corruption.

Race-wise, the plan was the same as before: follow Matt as we crank the rate until we literally can't keep up any more. This was extremely effective as we took a length or so off the other crew and then had the opportunity to practise 'striding'. Lol. We did take the rate down and rowed through the line comfortably ahead (my legs decidedly in favour of not having to row at 100% effort for such a long way). Fordy did comment that the bucket rigging helped togetherness remarkably; maybe we should all follow Jesus.

I can't compete with the puns.

As I recall, by this point we'd gotten the hang of our start sequence designed to win a 300m race. Only this time the race lasted 500m. Some bad strokes from the other crew took the edge off their speed and we clawed back a foot or two. Sadly, it was to no avail, and we crossed the finish line slightly behind in what was a decent race. We felt vindicated when our bank party later told us they hard the finish marshal telling the start that that race was possibly on the unfair side, and won the best costume prize to boot. But it was annoying not have had the third of a length head start we'd have needed to clinch the win, and not to have the opportunity to race the other FaT boat and prove that big ergs will only get you so far; you need to row well. Like we were. Right?

 We had a pleasant row down to the Plough, during which I began to understand why we race in sensible boats like VIIIs, rather than double-coxed tubs. Chloe and Zoe between them established that having two coxes is not very effective for going in a straight line. 8 new blisters later, we arrived on the start line against Darwin. Under (partial) direction of the umpires we were given half a length advantage because a) our costumes were better than theirs, b)both Darwin rowers we men (in drag, of course), c)they had a much lighter boat, and only one cox, so were carrying as much as 100kg less weight than us, and d)we felt like rowing a slightly shorter race. After faffing around for what seemed like forever, we then raced down half the reach, ending in a dead heat, and a re-row.  

Unfortunately the re-row started with no advantage, and we didn't quite have the muscle to move our much heavier boat past theirs, ending in a loss by about 1/4 of a (tub) length. The cardboard spear was then promptly thrown at the opposition, though the prevailing wind meant that it didn't go anywhere near hitting them. On the row home we kept a lookout for the viking helmet that had been removed from Zoe's head by the wind during the re-row. Though we were not victorious, we had lots of fun, and enjoyed taking the now very soggy cardboard shields off the tub at the end of the day.