Wraysbury Long Distance Sculls 2011

It was great to have another 10 crews entered for the last early long distance event of the season, the Wraysbury Long Distance Sculls held on Saturday. It wasn't an easy entry, with many changes in crews beforehand meaning that some crews were not racing with their usual partners & also racing out of status. The entry & draw did however give us 2 guaranteed points in the bag before the start in Gents Novice Restricted & Ladies Novices, provided that everyone got around the course in one piece. That proved somewhat more difficult than expected in a couple of events as crews played bumper cars with the island just upstream from Magna Carta Island. Ah well, put that down to another learning experience, at least boats & blades remain unscathed.

The racing proved the high class of our most recent Novices, our intermediates with a good mix of a few more experienced hands in the pairings. First up was a composite status crew that enabled Martin Roche & Stephen Russell, coxed by Amanda Leach, to win in the Gents Novice class. Now you might have forgiven this crew if they'd have taken it a bit easy given that this was a dead cert win, but no. They completed the course in 24.19, which was faster than the two Gents Junior & two of the three Gents Junior-Senior crews, so exceedingly well done.

Next up were two of our newest recruits, Henry Roffey & Giles Sutton, again coxed by Amanda Leach in the Gents Novice Restricted category. This was another course where careful coxing & working with the crew was essential to avoid arms blowing up to ensure that they finished in good order. So it's very encouraging that whilst this was one of our banked wins that the crew put in a measured performance to finish in a very respectable 17 position overall in 26.11 & faster than three of the Gents Novice crews. Great work!

And last but by no means least, in another composite status team, we saw the pairing of Verena Diehl & Caroline Matthews, coxed this time by the experienced Heather Bateman, win the Ladies Novice class, a tad behind the guys, in a time of 26.12. At last, after their sterling efforts in the Nancy Knight race at Dittons, the ladies finally secured their victory with a time that would have beaten one of the ladies junior teams. Sadly due to insufficient entries in class, both of these last two successful crews were unable to receive medals from the organisers but that doesn't detract from their brilliant achievements, so many congratulations.

We maintained our tally with DSPC, at 3 wins each in the Ormiston points.

So that's the end of the long course events until the marathons in October. We now have a change of pace to get ready for the first short course regatta of the year, returning to the Wraysbury reach for Egham International on Sunday 26th June. Before then there needs to be a lot of hard work for some to learn the techniques of starting & competing in side-by-side races.

Well done to all our competitors & supporters from the bank.

Cheers

Roger