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W1 - WEHORR

Posted: Thursday 26 March 2009, 10:32AM by Beth Parker

The 7th of March saw the women’s first boat taking a trip out to London to compete in the Women’s Head of the River Race. It was the first time any of us had competed in this race and we were all very excited about rowing on a river that could fit more than two boats on it side-by-side! The weather conditions were perfect – a calm river and beautiful sunshine - so we were all looking forward to the race.

After spending well over an hour marshalling, we were finally racing and we set off a good pace under Chiswick Bridge. We knew this race would be difficult as we had been training for sprint races all term and 6.8km was definitely not a sprint! Even so we went off with confidence and had overtaken our first crew before Barnes Bridge.

Further down the course we began to overtake Royal Chester who we had been steadily gaining on. Unfortunately their cox would not move over to allow us to come by which resulted in some blade clashing. Our cox did well to keep calm and the crew did their best to keep concentration in the boat and not on the crew we were parallel to.

We remained with Royal Chester for a large part of the course which unfortunately meant that we were not in the fast part of the stream. Although we pushed hard and were slowly moving up, eventually it showed that we were a sprint crew and Royal Chester did a very impressive push to move past us. Although it was dispiriting it did mean that we could go back into the stream for the last part of the race.

We moved up 91 places to finish 155th out of 284 so we were pretty pleased and I’m sure that we’ll be back next year with high hopes for moving up even further!