The Club's Results

Fuzzy Duck? Who are they? Well, they were old boys from some school or other, looked pretty big and not nearly as bad as you might expect.

The race itself was appalling. Although bow 3 had been doing a couple of weeks training in a IV, unfortunately Din couldn't make the regatta due to long standing commitments, so Jacob stepped in to fill the seat. Suffice to say the 20 seconds of paddling down to the start was not enough for us to gel, and despite a reasonably together and quick start, we fell apart horribly after about 10 strokes. I don't really want to go into the details of the race (it was very unpleasant); lets just say the combination of wind, choppy water, out of time and over rating rowing and a number of boat stopping crabs left us very wet and very embarrassed.

Fuzzy Duck went on to win the final by 3 lengths, making us the 2nd best in the category even with our agricultural rowing. If we could have rowed at about 50% of our best we would have won. Easily. This at least gave us some hope for Ross the next day, but as it stood we deserved a more severe thrashing than we received. (Phil)

Having enjoyed the wonderful hospitality of the Shepherd household the previous evening, we were up early in order to be at the river by 8am to race the "Sunday Winner" slot. As it turned out this slot was not taken, so we had to wait till midday to race our first round, giving us time to catch up on some sleep the important current affairs reported in Zoo magazine.

After arming ourselves with Zoo's "Man Facts", we eventually found our opposition and rowed down to the start. The plan was simple; row together. We got the inside lane and so started about half a length down, and knew that we had another half length defect to make up at the finish due to the angle of the line. The race went a lot better than at Bristol (although still pretty scrappy), and we found ourselves on almost level terms at the halfway point. However, we were never really able to put in a good push together and fell apart a little in the last 10 seconds or so, thus handing Chester the win.

As in Bristol, our first round opponents went on to win, winning each of their other two races by at least half a length, once again proving that if we had rowed at the level we are capable, we may well have won the event. In spite of this, we all had a great weekend and look forward to getting in some good training next term and winning some races. (Phil)