And so after all the waiting around following the RACE DAY in Manningtree last weekend, Friday afternoon was a much more relaxed affair with another WivGigs social row.
I don’t think I’m alone in the club in coming to the conclusion that race days are a little bit too much stress without much reward.
I don’t personally get stressed out with it all, but hanging around all day with some very tense rowers for what can be a 20-minute burst is difficult to justify at the weekends.
Social rowing it is then. You have time for conversation, you have time for gossip, you have time to do not a lot of rowing and just sit around in the boat and take pretty pics.
Whatever.
We launched at the Sailing Club hard, having been kindly waved through by a couple of dinghy sailors waiting to launch. The chap, in particular, had the most magnificent sailing beard.
I was also experimenting with my own appearance. It didn’t quite go to plan. I opted for my wet rowing shoes and then some ridiculous cycling luminous bib shorts that I rolled up to my knees as I waded in the water.
I won’t be troubling the front page for any fashion shoot of the next edition of Sexy Rowers Monthly.
We headed downstream, which was a surprise to me. I was half expecting the row to be cancelled. It was rather windy and the waters were incredibly choppy once we reached the Creek.
I’m not into all this nature shit but perhaps the highlight for me was some birds (GAWD knows what) that decided to speed past us at an incredibly low angle, almost hugging the water.
We reached a buoy. I’m not sure which buoy it was. You come back to this blog for these kinds of details, right?
The turn was made and then we had a bit of a brief water break before making the row back upstream. We must have downed oars for no more than two minutes. We had drifted around 500 km or so already back towards the Sailing Club. It was that kind of tide.
Talk in the boat then returned to race rowing. I had absolutely no idea there is a 300 Club option available for the Harker’s Yard series.
To qualify you need to have at least 300 years of age in the boat for all four rowers and a cox.
This could work perfectly if you somehow got a centurion in the boat who did pretty much fuck all and then some rather energetic 50 year-olds.
We recovered Varuna with still plenty of water around the Sailing Club. This was a nice ying to the yang of the Manningtree chaos of last weekend.
