The Club's Results

Quite a nervy row, with the surge being an afterthought:- we still won convincingly, but unanimously agreed it was a shocker: have to do much better next time! (Anything to do with being short)

We had a surge ???

Some good steering off the start pushed the Emma crew wide down the long reach while we sloooooooooooooowly pulled ahead. Lots of powerful strokes were taken, but we probably need to be more efficient in our rowing, and apply the power together. (Matt)

To tell the story of this race, let me take you back to an event that morning, 6.15am, before the day's racing....
I turned up to sub into a 1st VIII outing, to discover that they had removed their rudder getting BP1 off the trailer. Two members of the 1st VIII were busy attempting to remove BP2's rudder to replace it. Dispite protestations, they continued, attempting for a good 10 mins until they realised that they would never remove it, no matter how hard they tried.... We had the outing in BP2, but I digress:

A much stronger start and a powerful surge saw us onto a glorious row: the kind that is painful but you don't want to stop because it is going well. The Queens boat had burned it off the start (see photo of Mays 2002 for Queens' ability to do this) and gone up by three seats or so. 40 seconds down the course, they were starting to blow, whereas we were in our rhythm: we stopped the rot and started to pull back. It was developing into a wonderful row through and a decent scrap. Imagine our surprise to have our rudder break during the next push.... We ended up getting far too friendly with banks, marshalling boats, etc. and decided to pull in further down the course until the end of the set of races and then limp home.

A day of bizarre coincidences, no? (Anything to do with being short)

To add to Will's report, I could just see the Queens' cox starting to return to my peripheral vision (eyes in the boat !) when I realised that bow-side's blades were just skimming the edge of the bank. Remembering that there's a slight corner on the reach, I assumed it was just another excellently judged line from our cox when instead of the expected call of "Push," my speaker relayed a not-quite-sotto voce-enough "Oh, ****" as we landed gracefully halfway along the reach.
After pushing off, we pulled another top notch start out of our bag of tricks and powered off after the enemy, determined to catch them and make a fight of it. Coming under the railway bridge our line was a little wide and we slewed to a halt next to a Darwin crew. As the realisation that we'd lost our rudder set in, we decided to make our way home in fours, using the other four for steering; Rachel still had her hands on the rudder strings, though, and continued to steer on the journey home, despite having experienced the futility of such action in the race :-) (Matt)