The Club's Results

In an unpreceeded fit of keeness BPBC women decided not only to have a practice outing for Fairbairns but a practice race! Now this was so unthinkable indeed that Cantabs spontaneously decided that the notion "W Inv 8+" on the entry form must have been a misspelling and instead put us in the draw as men. They also had a lot of confidence in our fitness and speed and decided to send us off 2nd in our division.

After realising that there wasn't any W Inv opposition in the draw we thought we might as well take on the challenge and race against the men... and Cantabs came up with the ingenious idea to create a sponaneous time handicap system for us. It remains to see if they actually implemented it...

After an initial unsuccessful attempt to get the timing around the back end together we gave up on that and decided to just make up for the lack of togetherness by increasing the "grunt factor". Cantabs in turn decided to start us first in the division and then not give us more than the usual gap before setting off a LMBC men's VIII to hunt us down. We responded with an epic push out of First Post which helped to delay the inevitable for a little while, but unfortunately we then panicked a bit on Plough Reach when LMBC steamed past us. After some wobbles around Ditton we got it back together on the Reach and found a slightly too controlled but reasonably efficient rhythm for everything but the back end which was still all over the place since we all felt the desperate urge to keep up some individualism. We nevertheless put up a good fight against Pembroke men who came up from behind and held them off pretty much up to Peters Posts. In summary, it was a committed though not pretty row and for a scratch crew we gave a pretty solid performance! (Ulrike)

Stronger than "didn't give more than the usual gap to LMBC M1"; shouted at us to get moving when we tried to leave a sensible gap to you. (Peter)