The Club's Results

fastest 3rd VIII, beaten by only one 2nd VIII 

Am waiting to hear the official line on this, but it looks like a superb result to me. Shame it wasn't just 2s faster, though...! 

Definitely our worst race all day as we had an OK start and then splashed our way all down the reach probably over-rating. We were on the meadow side and Corpus were only about 1-1.5 lengths off us up until the Railway bridge where we pulled ahead. Everyone agreed straight after the race that it was a bad row. 

After a lot of discussion regarding our start, wind and settle, we decided we should try and reach a better racing rhythm this race. Racing on the towpath side, we set off at the same frantic pace as the last race until urged to "Relax!". It seemed to work and we had a storming row up to the railway bridge with things dropping off a bit near the end. 

Again the meadow side, this was our best row. It was a very close race with us moving ahead by a length after a minute. We kept a very good race pace with nice timing all the way up to Morley's Holt when the bend started to favour Pembroke. They came back at us strongly but we had started to respond when we had a very bad clash of blades. Phil's seat got knocked so he couldn't slide and Pete caught a crab. We were forced to stop rowing briefly and Pembroke set off and crossed the line only to discover they had been disqualified. 

Again on the meadow side, we had a decent start but still lost about a length and a half to them. We maintained distance from there all the way home, taking the rating up to something ridiculous by the end for one last push, but it was all in vain. (Dan)

Despite closing to within 3/4 of a length of Downing III by First Post Corner they bumped a shockingly bad Peterhouse II. We rowed over reasonably comfortably, closing down to within 3 lengths of Darwin I who started 6 1/2 lengths ahead of us before they bumped Girton. We finished at least 8 lengths ahead of Corpus II - the boat directly behind us. Roll on Wednesday!!! (Dan)

We set off again from station 13, winding it up to about 36 and no sooner had we reached our 'surge' than we got the first horn. As a result the rate change didn't really happen and we kept it going at a pretty high rating that felt powerful and pretty controlled. Two horns, three and then continuous followed in very quick succession and we had to hold it hard under the Motorway Bridge after bow's bladed ended up between Peterhouse's cox and stroke man! It could have been quite nasty but everything was OK (except Andy's rigger).
We were very chuffed on the way home with just one question in our minds: why did it take Downing III till first post to catch them yesterday? Friday will be an interesting day... (Dan)