Saturday 9 December, the day of the, Remenham Challenge, has arrived, it is running a week earlier than last year.
There were 89 entrants from the the seven clubs that make up the Remenham club, Quads have also been introduced this year.
The forecast for the Saturday was 40+mph winds and the entire race was in danger of being cancelled.
All 14 development crews were ‘scratched’ from the race on Friday evening and a decision was to be taken on Saturday morning before 07:00 to determine if the main event would still be going ahead.
Our crew was entered as Open Masters D (50-55 average age), for which there were 5 entrants and we were drawn to start as boat number 9, the second of the 5 crews, I was in the #6 seat.
Saturday morning and the decision had been made that the race would be going ahead, but could still be cancelled at the briefing, or at any time after if the marshals deemed it too dangerous to race.
I travelled to our host club, London Rowing Club, by tube, hampered by works on the Piccadilly Line, which meant I had to come up with a slightly more inventive route to Putney Bridge.
I arrived at around 10:30 to help with putting the boat back together and re-attaching the riggers, it was pouring with rain, but at least it wasn’t as cold as last year.
After rigging the boat we went to visit our host club to change and await the briefing, at least it had also stopped raining.
The tide started to turn around 11:20, the race will be run with the help of the outgoing tide.
At around 11:40 we headed back off to the boat to put it on the water and head up to the start rowing in 4’s with our usual square blade warm up routine.
The row to the start took around 30 minutes and this year we did not have to sit around for too long waiting for the start which happened only a few minutes late at 12:35.
We turned the boat around and headed up to the start raising our rate to our race pace of 30spm and settled in for the race.
As expected the two Molesey crews powered past us, and we did our best to hold off the crews from Kingston.
The river was very windy and choppy and for some reason the boat was leaning heavily to bow side.
I did my best to compensate for this by leaning as far out to stroke side as I could, although it seemed to make little difference.
Our number 3 caught a crab about 2/3 of the way into the race, but he recovered quickly and we only lost around 10 seconds due to this mishap.
We completed the 4,000m course in 12:35.36, over 90 seconds faster than last year, this was later rounded up to 12:01.36 after handicap allowances were applied.
This placed us 4/5 in Masters D, 10/14 in Open Masters 8+ and the raw time placed us 51/71 for all competitors.
After rowing down through the bridges and back up to the landing stage we disembarked from the boat, carried it back to the trailer and went off to our host club to change, before heading back to de-rig the boat and put it back on the trailer.
I then set off home again, by now the wind was really picking up and I was in danger of losing my hat.
View from Putney Bridge back towards the boat clubs on my way to the tube station.