The Club's Results

I'd left Cambridge at midnight, and arrived at 5.00a.m. - the only thing I remember is cruising in the mid-twenties a long way ahead of our oppo. Tom's "loosening burst" towards the end of the course was countered five strokes later by an "I can't be arsed" from the stroke seat. (JPD)

JPD really was very knackered. Despite this being our first race I was pulling him round with minimal effort, and failed to compensate for this on the steering. This led to a somewhat cycloidal trajectory which thankfully failed to coincide with either bank or the navigation lane. (Rose the Twat)

We had decided that Imperial would be tough opponents to beat; we responded by practicing our firm pressure in the warm up area. Unfortunately I accidentally snapped the handle off my blade in a particularly well connected start. We managed to not fall in, so we retrieved the spare blade and waited for the start.

It quickly became apparent that Imperial weren't going anywhere quickly - we took a length every 100m for the first half of the course, at which point they stopped rowing. Where's a well meaning chap to get any decent racing these days? (JPD)

These guys had beaten Christian and Dan earlier, so we knew that power over technique wasn't going to work. Fortunately for us the very idea of technical rowing was born at BPBC, so we floated effortlessly over the water to another comfortable victory. (JPD)

A good start and we were a length ahead. Ten strokes of clean finishes and it was two lengths. We got another length somewhere over the rest of the course. (Rose the Twat)

This was a very frustrating race. We had a dodgy start (as proved to be true for the rest of the weekend) and went down by a length. However we then started coming back quite quickly but some dodgy steering from the opposition saw us clash blades and despite the fact that neither of us was that massively disadvantaged by the blade clash they stopped the race. We decided to race the course anyway. Although we didnt go full tilt we pelted out a fairly solid 26ish until about 50m from the finish.

However to make matters worse because we rowed the course fairly hard we were spun and on our way back to the landing stage before the other crew had finished. They then proceeded to head straight for us while we were trying to land. The end result was that we put our bows up the bank damaging them badly. (Dan)

This was a frustrating race. We had decided to patch the hole in our bows and race in the Churchill pair again despite our earlier accident and the offer from our opposition to use their boat. We paddled up to the start and the gaffer tape seemed to be doing its job. We had another poor start and were down a length but i was confident we would come back as soon as we hit our rhythm. Unfortunately this never quite happened. The boat felt very heavy and we just didnt seem to be able to pick the boat speed or rate up to where it had been before. As a result we lost.

When we went to lift the boat out of the water after the race we discovered one of the causes of hte problem. Although the gaffer tape we had applied to the hole in our bows was still attached we had failed to notice the other hole. As a result our bow section was filled with a quantity of water sufficient to produce two 10cm high jets of water from our absent empacher number slot. Doh. I reckon there was probably close to 20 litres of water in the boat judging from the mess and weight.

I fear we may have finally pushed this boat beyond its limits. (Dan)

We had a reasonable start, and held level through the first 100m. The rowing then quickly deteriorated, with first Tom, and a few strokes later me getting stuck in at the finish. A lot of the faults which we had worked on over the last two weeks resurfaced. Very disappointing. (JPD)

Bewdley started with about 1/3 length advantage, although crews should be started level. They moved out to almost a length by about 300m, but we moved back steadily and pushed through with about 200m to go. With about 20m to go, Tom's blade hit the blade of a Cambridge 99's pair who weren't properly in the navigation lane, but we had enough speed and advantage to drift across the line in front. Amusingly, the umpires ordered a rerow claiming we were impeded, but we managed to convince them that if a crew is impeded by an external event and still goes on to win the result stands.

This has probably been our most satisfying result yet - the Bewdley pair were powerful, we had a solid row and even my line wasn't bad considering we were in the middle lane of an unmarked course (with racing and navigation lanes on either side). (JPD)

I think this was the best push we managed all weekend. I called it with about 250m to go and we moved from about 1/2l down to 1/4l up over the next ten strokes. Mainly this was down to a clean increase in rate of about two pips. It seems this Bewdley pair were quite well known in their area for being good (they're brothers so have probably been together for a while) so pleasing to have beaten them! My legs were also absolutely shafted. (Rose the Twat)

We were again in the middle of the canal, and most of the race followed a similar pattern to that against Bewdley - they moved off the start to about 1/2 lenght, but we clawed back and pushed to just a couple of feet down with about 25 strokes to go. They then pushed back to gain 1/2 length advantage. Unfortunately we had drifted across into the navigation lane and got tangled with an eight with about 15 strokes to go. Although we would probably have lost the race without the collision, it was disappointing not to have such a close margin in the final of such a quality field - Bewdley were the quickest pair we have beaten, Southampton Uni (who were beaten by Northwich) went on to win several events through the weekend (including beating us and the quick Cantabs pair), and Northwich had won J2- at Nat Champs. (JPD)

Again I called the lift for home with 250m to go. However as Jon says, this pair were of a higher standard than the Bewdley one and managed to do an effective counter-push. Without the crash we'd have been about 1/3l down I suspect. (Rose the Twat)