Results and reports by Event

Having a rudder that is stuck at 45 degrees to strokeside does not aid steering, particularly over the Uni IVs course. That said Dave coped admirably until we came around Ditton, where bowside basically had to stop rowing to get us round. Still we made it, and the rowing was actually quite good. It was just quite a lot slower than FaT. Still, it was cool to have a sizeable wake.

Uploaded Monday 29th October, 19:39

It was a brisk sunny afternoon on the Cam. The world was in order: Chris was meant to be in the lab, Kenrick on a ward-round, and the undergrads were supposed to be pretending to work. However, a perfect warm-up was gave the afternoon a sense of foreboding - a warm-up's never meant to go well...

The start was, in the words of Nick, "Peachy". Light and loose, hitting highs of 46, we gained about a length on the FaT crew in front. Kenrick, pleasantly surprised the crew by taking a straight line down First Post reach, and the line judges for First Post corner awarded 8.7, 7.6, 9.1 (avg 8.5). Ten big strokes later, and we were into Grassy. Another satisfactory line round Grassy, apart from being a little wide on the exit which delayed our secret tactic of having a big push out of the corners.

It was going past the Plough that FaT started to take it away from us, and were probably back on station at this point.

In the finest tradition of Clare Mens IV- oarsmanship (see Suret et al 2003), we took a scenic route around Ditton - why race 3km when you can race 4km? This wasn't perceived as entirely conducive to victory by members of the bank-party, who were subsequently muted in their volume of support. It is an interesting philosophical aside to note, that encouragement is usually provided when crews need it least i.e. when winning, but such discussion is beyond the remit of this report.

Once we were (finally) straight on the Reach, we started to row really quite well - only at rate 31, which with the benefit of hindsight was probably a tad low. Time on the slide = Time wasted.

A couple of zig-zags for good measure saw us shoot under the Railway bridge and a tight line round to Morley's Holt, where we started cranking for the finish line.

Concerned that he might risk accusation of steering a dull line, Kenrick attempted to hit the bank twice in the final 250m, notably calling two strokeside corners on a straight piece of river.

We crossed the line, only to realise that FaT had been sitting there for some time. However, the race served as a useful warm-up for the main event of the Term: HoR4s on Saturday. As Nick said, "That's a completely different kettle of ball-games."

Uploaded Friday 2nd November, 0:12