Results and reports by Event

After last years disaster at Small Boats Regatta, including entering myself into too many events and loosing in most of them due to equipment failures, I decided to only enter one event this year. Originally, I wanted to enter the Mixed Doubles with fellow Clare rower Claire Watkins, but unfortunately she was not available. After looking around I found a more than competent partner in Caroline Habjan from Homerton, who raced in the winning Blondie crew this year. So finally I would go after that University Medal.

Or so I thought! When the draw came out, Caroline contacted me to tell me that she cannot make our race on Tuesday. I decided to take matters into my own hands and contacted the competing crews to ask them to move the race to Wednesday. By some miracle, everybody agreed to it, even CUCBC under the condition that we find 11 marshals for the event. Yes, 11!

As you will all know, as a rower you only know about 7 other people or maybe 8, if you consider coxes people. And finding 11 people to marshal the following day seemed simply impossible. But I had under-estimated the kindness of my fellow CBC and CUL rowers. A big thanks to all the people from CBC that readily volunteered to marshal without a hesitation. And I also want to give a special mention to Millie from FaT, who was supposed to race us today, but volunteered to marshal, when her partner had to scratch.

So against all the odds, we found enough marshals and the race was on! Caroline and I were given a pass straight to the final against a Caius crew. While we waited for our opposition at the start line, Caroline told me that she has to be back at the boathouse to leave for the lab in ten minutes. So our race plan was clear: Start fast, keep pushing hard until we are over the line and row home as quickly as possible.

The fast start did not really happen, mainly because the umpire decided to not waste time on the 'attention' and went straight to 'go'. Slightly surprised the start was by no means as smooth as the practice start we had done. However, we found into quickly into a rhythm that was nice, long and felt just beautiful...for about ten strokes, when the outflow made us wobble and reminded me gently that I was responsible for steering. Luckily, we had Dan Janes, the lightweight head coach, as a bank party who directed me with great precision though the race.

Under Dan's guidance I got us nicely around First Post Corner. Once around the corner I clashed my blades together and completely destroyed the beautiful rhythm we had been keeping up so far. However, Caroline just picked up from where we had left and I tried to follow. With the excitement I went a little wide into Grassy and almost parked us on the outside at the exit, but a little bit of additional pressure steering and we made it.

Rowing down Plough Reach I though about the opposition for the first time and was waiting for them to come around Grassy. When they came around the corner, I thought that they were holding station until I realised that we were about to go around Ditton. So we rowed around Ditton and I told myself that now it is only the Long Reach between us and the win. Not that much later I realised that there is a reason why the LONG Reach is called LONG, because it is LONG. I was struggling more and more to follow Caroline, especially now that the wind and waves had picked up a bit.

At this point I was not sure if our opposition had closed in on us or if they had not come around Ditton yet. Towards the end of the Long Reach, I had still not spotted them anywhere. When we finally pushed over the line just before the railway bridge I just said something like :'I cannot see them...let's row home!'

So we took a couple of strokes with no pressure to gather our breath and went back to steady state rowing to get to the boathouse as quickly as possible. It turns out we won the mixed doubles, so after all it was worth it and I am really thankful for everybody that came out there and helped make this happen!

Uploaded Wednesday 20th April, 23:19