The Club's Results

The start marshall was keen to use the beeper on his megaphone despite its not working, so the race was started with an 'Attention... <whimper>'. We set off but the opposition didn't, so we stopped, assuming the race would be restarted, but then they set off and no one told them to stop so we did started again. Great fun. The fact that the same start marshall was starting races with deliberate feedback later that day rather than just shouting 'Go' meant that Dan's loud call of 'Wanker' was fully justified and added to my amusement even if not the boat speed.

As for the rest of the race, they had a much greater cruising speed but an even worse steerer than me (who at least had the excuse that he'd never steered on the Cam before). Consequently we gained on each corner a decent proportion of what we had lost on the previous straight, and in fact gained a little bit for free when they scraped a moored boat on the Plough Reach. Unfortunately the Reach doesn't really have any corners so we lost by a few lengths. We stopped once they did so I've no idea what the recorded margin will be...

Good practice for our 'real' race tomorrow, when the opposition should hopefully be of a lower standard.

Looks like we got a pretty poor time, nearly 30s off what we had done in training (in better conditions), and slower than Coker in his scull... (BJ)

We were hoping the lack of training together would limit the opposite pair to quite a slow cruising speed. This, when coupled with very little knowledge of the twists and turns of the Cam, would give us the edge. Certainly it looked promising on the way down. Big lads, but meandering all over the shop and it appeared they were rowing quite short - presumably because they had no confidence at front stops.

Unfortunately it turned out that, rather than rowing short, they were just putting down massive amounts of power. Off the 'start' (I'd meant to shout more, but we were - finally - winding) their banksteerer just about managed to keep them off the banks and they gained massively.

Under immediate pressure we changed the race plan, as being overtaken would be game over, not to mention humiliating. Front loading the race massively, our technique soon suffered but luckily each corner bought us a blissful respite. I don't think we were too bad on the reach and dug very, very deep. They had slowed as well, and I think this result was the best we could hope for in hindsight, and much better than being overtaken.

Bring on Foster Fairbarns. And a competent start martial. (Dan)

Well. Bit of a wank start due to me winding it up rather too much, despite telling Erica reassuringly that we'd be fine as long as we kept our length, stayed relaxed, and just found the awesome rhythm we had in our 'cheating' outing (well we had to try the corners at least once, even if we forgot to practice starts..!). She duly called 'length' and 'relax', which finally happened in about plough reach. They'd definitely settled to a stronger, longer rhythm and caught up with us round the corners, but once we were on the reach we really settled down, found a good rhythm and gave it a some good FaT grunt into the wind. We pulled away from them steadily and pipped them at the post, by a definite margin, which Mark Jacobs (despite not having taken times for this race - the only one he hasn't managed to today apparently, nor timing the difference between the finish marshalls' hands) decided was 'about 1 second, therefore a dead heat'. I got rather angry, rather bluntly suggested that there's no way that he could know whether it was more or less than a second without timing it, and therefore contested his judgement. We await the results of this.. I'll restrain myself from saying any more until after then.
Thanks to the Jesus girls for a good race, looked like a v nice rhythm you had there (sorry Erica), though if you want to 'scare us' before the start you'll have to do a better job than paddling by and waving ;) (Joff)