The time race

We all congregated at the boathouse at 6.30 and got our blades and scraped together some dodgy-looking seats because that was all that was left. We got the boat out and were asked to move up, and so moved up to where the bank ended at the lock end. We had to fix the speaker system and so a few crews asked us to move off. We ignored them until they got insistent. Boat after boat after boat kept coming out of the boathouses and wanting space on the water. It was unbelievable.

We inched our way down river through the traffic to past the railway bridge. I was nervous because I’d had such a bad experience on bowside recently and I was acutely away of the effect I was having on the balance in that seat and couldn’t ask George about how to deal with it. We were crew number 18 and I had the number on my back because I was in bow. That meant we had to wait against the bank opposite number 17 and wait to be called down to start. It took ages and we could see crews stretching downriver for what seemed like miles (we later found out there were at least 64 crews).

We finally rowed off and gently passed under the railway bridge with a relaxed rhythm. Despite this, I was so nervous I was shaking and caught half a crab early on and recovered. We built up speed and the balance improved gradually until we were going quite fast. The crew behind overtook us and clashed our blades. I felt a little more comfortable by this stage and when we crossed the finish line we were flying (for our standards).

Later George complimented me on my level head when we clashed bowside blades with a passing crew. I also asked Melissa about balance and she thought that George was going the right way about it in just getting our blades in and out together. She talked about drawing in and tapping down heights, which we incorporated in our next outing.

We found out at about 9.30 that our crew came 25th out of 29 mens’ crews in a time of 10 mins 25 seconds. Ashley said that this attracted the attention of the Club captain. Someone told us that two men’s crews crashed on the corners.