The Club's Results

Encouragingly, we were comfortably faster than the boat chasing us in bumps. Less usefully, the boat ahead of us was faster than us, but hopefully we'll be able to change that. We had several factors which made this race quite challenging for us. Firstly, we weren't in our actual boat, as Richard Church was being repaired at the time, and secondly we had only had 3 outings as a crew before the race. As for the race itself, we set off, and wound to a rate which felt comfortable-ish, however at this point the cox box ratemeter broke. We settled, and then proceeded to row relatively mediocrely to the lock. Then proceeded perhaps the most entertaining bit of the race, as we almost succeeded in sending a Girton crew over the weir, but tragically they avoided this fate. The row back was similar, with a particularly bad bit into the headwind down the reach, however we then heard a crew ahead of us, picked up a bit, and over took them under the railway bridge. Pity it was a veteran mixed crew, but hey. All in all, not terribly fast, but probably hugely useful for our bumps campaign. (Swords)

300m before the finish of the second race was leaving it a bit late to learn how to bring the qualities of our low rate rowing into the world of 30+spm, but at least it got done. Commitment was good and thanks a bunch to Laura and Anne who cheered us on and got a lot of photos and videos taken - invaluable for analysing our technique.

Bring on Champs Head - what we need to do now is focus on rate, because that's when we get sloppy. Past that, the only other thing we need is to row in a shell of equivalent standard to our opposition. Make cover, not war. (Jij)