This is a 3,300m head race event for single and double sculls only, racing against the stream and potentially against the prevailing wind at this time of year.
Four of us signed up for this event and we split into two doubles, my doubles partner from last week was racing with his colleague who also came from Burway, I was racing with a long time Staines Member, both are called Mark (we have 4
Marks in the men’s Masters squad).
Both crews were racing in the first division at 09:38, boating at just before 09:00 to row up to the start, we were racing masters E (55-50) in a D/E category, the other two were racing masters C (40-45) in a C/D category.
My doubles partner had not been down prior to the event itself, so this was going to be a ‘scratch crew’ on the day.
Come race day, I arrived around 07:00 and once again I was there before the trailer by nearly 45 minutes.
The trailer finally arrived and the other double crew and I set about rigging our boats, no sign of my doubles partner (he has form for turning up late).
10 minutes before we are due to boat, he finally turns up, I inform him that he will be steering as he is potentially better at this than me, plus I will almost certainly put down more power than him.
It is a short walk to the boating area that involves crossing the road, fortunately there are marshalls to stop the traffic for us.
We get out on the water head upstream a little before turning and heading down to the start, and see if we can actually ‘sit the boat’.
Boat balance is looking pretty good, but about half way to the start my partner is complaining that the foot steering does not appear to be working, at which point I remind him that the foot steering is not connected and steering is via oar pressure – “that explains a lot” he says and then has to mentally adjust to steering with his oars rather than his foot.
We turn early only to discover that we have not gone anywhere near far enough as we have actually turned at the start marker, not the marshalling point!
Turn once again and head on up to the marshalling point, around 1,800m from where we boated.
Sat and waited for around 10-15 minutes before being called to start.
I had reset my SpeedCoachGPS after the row to the start, but forgot to hit start again, so failed to record the actual race!
We steered a reasonable course, only shouted at once for going over the middle of the bouyed course, I rated 28spm for the whole piece having decided that 30 would probably be too much for my partner to keep up with over the 3,3000m and just concentrated on applying power.
There had been a fair amount of rain the previous few days so the stream was quite strong, we were rowing against it and our average pace was around 2:40/500m.
We were overtaken by 3 crews from the next category (masters C/D) which was hardly surprising, I put on a burst at 32spm for the last 120m from the last bridge.
I think I nearly killed by doubles partner as he freely admitted he was nowhere near as fit or as strong as me and was completely spent by the time we reached the finish.
The return journey involved rowing around the various islands for an additional 3,500m back to our landing stage.
The GoPro stopped recording 2/3 of the way into the return journey, so missed some of our other tangles with the bank and trees.
Our handicap adjusted time was 16:44 which placed us 6th out of 6 (originally 8, but two teams scratched), and 171/393 entrants (non time adjusted)
The winning crew from Tideway Scullers came 15th overall with their non adjusted time and 4th overall after applying handicaps!
The other crew managed a better time of 16:38, adjusted to 16:14.
They had a few more steering issues than us and clashed with a couple of other boats on their way down.
I hung around and watched the next division, standing about 500m down from the big road bridge, taking pictures of all of the Staines Juniors as they went past, the marshall near wheer I was standing was yelling at about every second crew to ‘take the bend’ before they crashed into the bank.
I then headed home to support a DR failover for one of our server environments.
I will endeavour to put a YouTube video together when I find some spare time, I have scrubbed through the footage, but need to find the ‘energy’ for another all day editing session.