The Club's Results

I could blame the fact that this race was my first ever outing in a double. Or that Andrew and I had not sculled together ever. Or that I had spent most of the previous 24hr on a series of delayed flights from the States and had had negligible sleep.

But I won't. They were a lot better than us. (Ingers)

As Chris says, they were just a hell of a lot better than us and it was just the luck (or not) of the draw.
We did actually have a pretty awesome row considering the circumstances. No crashes or crabs, although we did fish out a toilet from the river (complete with turd!) (Rupert the Bear)

The winners completed the course in 8m05s, a cool 22s quicker than any of the other doubles races on Monday and Tuesday. So it seems like these guys might have been a bit unfortunate in coming up against a probable winner in the first round. (Dan)

9:50 down; 12:17 up

The river was in quite high flood ensuring a strong stream. After hours backing it down to maintain place marshalling we set off at a fairly rushed pace. I was having a bit of a mare steering in the downstream conditions and we did a scenic tour of both banks prior to the Reach. It was also quite bumpy here which seemd to badly affect our less than perfect stability! The rate stayed a little high and we were perhaps not quite getting enough out of our legs but a reasonable push out of Ditton picked it up. First Post Reach was OK and we finished strongly.

In the break we realised we needed to work with the legs a little more in the second leg and set off at a slightly less frantic but probably faster speed upstream. I had a slightly better time of it with the steering and a nice push in the choopy water by the P&E saw us pip past a birds pair on the finish. We felt the 2nd leg had been better and this was confirmed in the results as our time gap was smaller than all similarly paced crews.

Alas, we didn't quite achieve our No. 1 objective being slower than the FaT women by 11s and 3s on the 2 legs but I feel it was a solid result and we beat 4 men's viiis and 8 women's viiis. (Ingers)

Not much to add that Chris hasn't already said except that it was great fun, despite the pre-race formal hall! Double sculls rule!! (Rupert the Bear)