The Club's Results

Ro had been asked to race this with a guy from Jesus to maximise their point gathering for the Michell cup, so I was expecting to just be racing the FF pairs. However, cycling down the towpath bankpartying some of the women, I came across Mark Beer who asked me if I wanted to race; the condition was I had to find a boat. It turned out that the timings worked so we could use the FaT women's double, and I had a lycra at the boathouse.
With little time to spare to adjust anything we met at the FaT boathouse, climbed aboard and set off. We quickly discovered that neither of us could fit through the shoulders of the Burgashell, but there seemed no obvious solution; Coker was using his seatpad and we couldn't think of anywhere else to acquire one from.

After some unexpectedly bad paddling (in comparison to the previous year's scratch attempt), I came to realise that Ro was making up for not being able to get past half slide by putting huge power into the finish; as long as I also loaded up what felt like a 70 kg bench pull, we extracted together and it ran much more smoothly.

When we got to the start we discovered the Georgina was following us down and we had a little time to play with, so we added a few inches to the outboard and awaited our opposition. I hadn't looked them up sufficiently at the time, or I might have been even more worried; they had a 3rd and a 4th place at the Junior Worlds between them, and Will was getting fit for starting at Leander the following September. Given my relative lack of power and sculling experience, it was certainly going to be a challenge even without having to row at half slide.

The sculling was reasonably effective, given the circumstances, but at 1500m we were still either level or barely ahead, and when I communicated this to Ro the rate came up still further (going fast at half slide already necessitating a fair amount of rate) and we wound frantically for the line, eventually finding a reasonable margin before I collapsed over the line. (Peter)

This might have been another reasonably hard race, but the Lawes-Railton double disappeared after their first round, possibly due to the substantial delays caused by a combination of us and the Georgina.
Instead we were left to race some guy from Jesus and a cox, who looked like they were sculling quite nicely but who were presumably several hundred watts of power down.
Given the unpleasantness of sculling fast at half-slide, we did the minimum necessary to safely win, as evidenced by the time.

It was a pity my last races on the Cam with Ro were hampered by inappropriate equipment, but it was still very good fun and very instructional. (Peter)