Sunday 24th March was the Vesta International Masters Head of the River Race, or Vets Head for short.
Saturday was the Open HORR, last week the Women’s HORR and the Junior HORR was midweek.
In a typically arrogant British fashion, this is not the Head of the Thames, but simply ‘The Head of the River Race, or ‘The Eights Head’, performed over the ‘Championship Course’ (The course is 4.2 miles or 6,800m) on the Thames, from Mortlake to Putney, with the Ebb tide.
The Oxford/Cambridge Boat Race or ‘The Boat Race‘ takes place over the same course, but from Putney to Mortlake, with the Flood tide, usually on the following weekend.
The average age of our 8+ crew placed us in Masters D, for which there were 16 entrants, and we were drawn to start 14th with a race number of 40, so in the first of 5 divisions of 50(ish). There were 256 entrants, mostly Eights, but also some Quads at the end.
As there are more than 100 boats taking part, the river is closed to all other traffic for the duration of the race.
The race start is at 15:45 from above Chiswick Bridge.
Our club has been assigned Barn Elms Boat Club (BAE) as our host club which is located on the South side of the river about 5-600m from the finish line.
We have agreed to meet at 13:00 to rig the boat, which meant I left home at 11:30 taking the London Underground to Putney Bridge station and then walking about 1.5Km from there to Barn Elms.
Of course the trailer is nowhere near the actual boathouse and is a good 2-300m away at the rugby club and needs to be carried to the riverside where we reassemble and re-rig it ready for racing.
On the water at 14:30 for our row up to the start
We are in division 1, so do not need to cross the river, our 6,800m row up to the start took around 48 minutes including warming up in 4’s and then at a steady state row at around 20spm to get up well above Chiswick Bridge.
There was a fair amount of wind, so most of the journey to the start was against a head wind, this should turn into a tail wind for the race itself, additionally the row was on mainly slack water as the tide was still turning during this time, although by the time we were sat in our marshalling position, the tide was flowing out and the wind pushing us as well, there was a fair amount of work required to stay in position.
15:35: time to ‘disrobe’ and get ready for the race itself.
15:45 and we can see the first boats starting to turn, last sip of water and start to edge out into the stream and turn the boat, 2-300m of settling ourselves and then getting up a ‘head of steam’ and we are off.
Our race rate was predetermined as 28spm and we largely held to that, drifting up to 29 and occasionally 30spm averaging around 1:30/500m pace (remember this is tide assisted).
We held off the crew from Chesterton who started at 41, however the 45 Masters E crew from Molesey came past us at around 3,000m, his is the same crew that went past us like we were stationary at Remenham, but this time we made them work for it and held them off for a decent period of time. They were shortly followed by the 44 crew Masters E crew from Upper Thames.
Around the same time we had managed to catch the 39 crew from Peterborough City RC, so were 3 abrest on the river and still going strong.
We were gaining on the 38 boat from Cantabrigan RC but never quite overtook them despite a push from Fullham Football ground where we upped the rate to 34spm and had the pace down to 1:24/500m for the final 2-300m dash for the finish line at Putney Pier.
Race over, we rate down and continue through the Putney bridges to turn.
Then head back up to Barn Elms to take the boat out and de-rig, concluding about 16,500m of round trip for a 6,800m race.
Our official time was 20:20.3 which placed us 10/16 and only a few seconds behind 9th place, and only 1:20 behind the winners in our category, not bad considering we had managed only a single outing as a crew, the previous Sunday at Dorney Lake.
Our masters womens crew finished 3rd in Womens Novice 8+ only 0.5 seconds behind the crew in second.
