The Club's Results

Not a bad row overall. The time is a little dissappointing though. We had an interesting start with Goldie IV immediately behind us and starting with overlap. Some dodgy steering by them meant that coming through Barnes Bridge they had only just got their nose in front, however soon after they got a bit more sorted and left us behind.

We proceeded to be taken inside and out about Hammersmith by a pair of competing Imperial College and UCL crews which resulted in some foul language from the Imperial boys.

At this stage the boat was going quite well and we maintained this right through until somewhere around 3 min from the finish. At which point we pretty much lost it. Im not sure exactly what went wrong but we failed to gain more than a couple of lengths on a crew that we were 36s faster than over the course. The failure was a technical one though, which is frustrating. (Dan)

By all choosing to bring enormous quantities of kit down to London we activated Sod's Law and gauranteed glorious weather.

After marshalling for what seemed like ages in a scene that rapidly began to resemble the M25 on a bad Friday evening we had about 100m of rowing to reach the start line and suddenly before we could really realise what was happening we were off. WE got up to 34 and then settled at 33 whicvh became 32 after a minute or so as we had planned. Goldie IV had clearly been motivated by our web poll and elected to _start_ with overalp on our stern. They were clearly faster than us but had clearly spent too much time at Ely and seemed blissfully unaware that the river Thames actually has some bends in it. As Will took an immacculate line around the first gentle corner to Barnes Bridge, they vanished off on the straight towards the marshalling crews. By the time they had returned to a sensible place on the river they had made up approximately 0m on us. Alas, their bowman then worked out what his wobbly footplate actually did and they nudged into the lead by the bridge and then took clear water by the bandstand and charged off downstream.

We settled into a fairly solid 32 that felt OK but were slowly overhauled by Imperial and UL who had started behind us which was a little demoralising. However, we managed a small victory when (correctly) holding our line and thus irritating the IC crew who told us to "move over, you c****". Charming.

The rate remained at 31 - 32 until after Hammersmith when the technique started to fade. At around Craven Cottage this 'fade' became a downright implosion and a series of shipwrecks brought the boatspeed right down. An ill-judged request from me to lift it up 2 at the Black Buoy bought an improvement for about 3 strokes before the wheels completely fell off and the last 2 minutes would have embarrassed a Novice third boat as we spacked home at a pathetic 28. This was rather annoying as it wasn't that we had gone too hard - we just weren't relaxed enough to get it back after a couple of rogue strokes. Sometimes I do think coxes have a role...

The overall time was a little disappointing but if you add on the estimated 25 - 30 seconds that a coxed IV takes then we were still pretty much the fastest Cambridge College boat (though some way behind a few Filth colleges). We probably need to go faster on Tuesday. We will. (Ingram)