The Club's Results

Having switched back to the Crokers from our practise paddle, we discovered again the substantial differences between the two sets of blades; Strawson and I immediately switched back from washing out to digging, but the giant weight of the blades did help sit the boat; in spite of this being the 'serious' crew of the day and the one we'd 'trained' in, members of the crew being away from Cambridge for carefully dovetailed periods of time meant we'd only had two outings with the correct four rowers in, the second of them with a substitute cox; Coker had only got off a plane from Poland the previous evening.
The issues with getting the blades out of the water still hadn't been dealt with by the time of the first stroke, and we were slightly down coming through 250. A push from Sonya at 400m gone, accompanied by plenty of shouting, got us moving, and from there we steadily moved on John of Gaunt (the only other crew up with us) to finish about a length up, without much of a wind in the last 250m. (Peter)