Results and reports by Event

I initially suffered a poor start having brought beer for the fresher's barbecue instead of my kit. Returning to the boathouse however, I found I was still having a better time of it than Dave who unfortunately had somewhat unconventionally decided to swim part of the course during his race.

This was my first race in a single, and I was slightly nervous, but had a very nice and relaxed paddle down to the start, where uncharacteristically I was early. Having asked the person chasing me if he could wait until the reach to overtake me so as to avoid litigation against me for my poor steering, I rowed up to the start.

I had a good start and got into the race well. For the first time I actually felt comfortable at a (relatively) high rate and to my surprise kept this up without too much trouble. The corners went ok, but I had spent some time practicing them. The bits I had been worried about were the straights, but thankfully I had "The world's greatest bank steerer" (Rich Barnwell - 2007) to help with these. As a result I only had to look behind me once on the reach. This allowed me to concentrate on my technique, but this depressed me and I nearly fell in. I did manage a gear change which was quite fun and stopped me getting bored. Things went slightly bad toward the end as my bank steerer had to disappear behind (or possibly even to) the pub, and I decided to take the scenic route to console myself. To my surprise I found myself crossing the finish line and nearly crashed into a barge in excitement having no energy left to get round the corner.

Anyway it was good fun and a good first sculling race. Hopefully I can build on this for the Small Boats Regatta next year.

P.S. Thanks to the Quad for the cake afterwards!

Uploaded Tuesday 16th October, 0:50

We were a crew of fairly mixed experience - Kate's antipodean sculling successes are a stark contrast to my Clinkerbell-based paddles. However, we had trained a whole 3 times together, and felt, perhaps unreasonably, confident.

Our start was lovely. To our intense relief, we left the little girls chasing us behind and settled to a reasonably comfortable 28. However, our lack of experience took it's toll and our technique slowly degenerated into something rather ugly. There was some yelling, some horrific grunting but we kept going, despite Laura bleeding everywhere from a scratched hand and my lack of technique leading to a painful thumb collision half way down the reach.

It wasn't a brilliant time, I suppose, but I imagine we must have been amongst the least experienced competitors, and we did win our class! As LJ put it, "for the first half we had technique; for the second half we had guts."

Uploaded Thursday 11th October, 15:21

Can't teach that.

Uploaded Sunday 14th October, 19:51

A minute and a half quicker than last year, so at least there's something good about this result.

Uploaded Monday 8th October, 18:18