The Club's Results

Amazing, or to put it in Jenny's words, 'purposeful' row and a very encouraging start to this important term. I'll leave it to the others to rave about how we comprehensively dropped second seded Clare and our battle with an ultimately disappointing Caius W1...

Let's keep our fingers crossed for the results...! (Pia)

Before the race, Jenny informed us that we were going to treat this as a bumps race, as that's when we do our best rowing. I didn't realise at the time how seriously she meant it...
The first half was solid and uneventful. Clare closed on us a little initially, but we found a good rhythm and pulled away convincingly on the reach. Caius managed to edge away from us gradually. At the lock, we decided we shouldn't let them do that in the second half.
Clare gave us a bit of a fright by deciding to start as close to us as they could manage but as soon as Jenny told us we were gaining on Caius, we forgot all about Clare, who were sliding away out of view.
On the reach we suddenly found ourselves alongside Caius who were in the process of doing a standing start, after some boat-stopping disaster. They did a good job of it, and seemed to be getting away, but soon we were bouncing around in their wake in bumps-tastic fashion, and were right on top of them when we crossed the line.
Certainly the most enjoyable head-2-head I've ever taken part in! (jo)

Highlights of this race were:

- seeing Clare fading into the distance on the second leg
- rounding Ditton to find Caius closer than expected
- being able to sit the boat quite decently between single strokes
- having Jenners back where she belongs!

It's also very pleasing to see that after ourselves and Caius the nearest opposition was over 40 seconds slower. Not sure what happened to Caius - on getting round Ditton we discovered them going slowly and having some trouble with something in the boat. We made it level with them, before they performed a very creditable restart and just about got away from us again. In the end we came out on top, by 6 seconds. However, this is a pretty small margin and it's probably fair to say that Caius were the faster boat when they actually had their blades in the water. On the other hand, this was our first outing in this crew, and we certainly have a lot of possible improvement before Bumps. Looking forward to opportunities for us to prove we can beat Caius without giving them any excuses.

A very good start to the term! (Erica)

Today I heard Jenners say one of the best things a cox can say - "We're going to overtake Caius" - pity it was partly due to their "ex-novice catching a boatstopper".

I also loved our last 10 strokes - I have yet to feel a more purposeful release of the black pearl... (Jane)

I looked at the full results - we beat crews from men's Lents 4, men's Lents 3, men's Lents 2 (!) and men's Lents 1 (!!!). :)

I was very impressed with the way Caius got it back together after their incident, and agree that they were probably the faster crew. However, as we all know, Bumps shows no mercy to those who crab. So as Erica said, we're looking forward to some decent racing later in term, free of crustacean company! (Amelia)