12-18 Sep

There’s been so much to do recently that my life has become very regimented in order to fit everything in. Last week we painted our boat in its new colours, this week was spent touching up the paintwork to look perfect, and applying the corporate logo stickers. It was annoying that the painting had run over the weekend (but then it’s just the old “everything takes 3 times longer than it should” rule kicking in again), but we carefully mapped out the week in order to fit everything in. Monday night, paint the blue stripes. Tuesday night, touch up the black paint. Wednesday night, final check over to make sure it’s all okay. Thursday morning (before work), apply the stickers. Friday morning, be ready for our photoshoot. Piece of cake.

Sadly, the weather had other ideas, and come midday Thursday we only had 3 stickers on the boat, the heavens having opened that morning. Given that the forecast was for constant rain until Friday afternoon, things weren’t looking very promising. But somebody up there likes us, and we had a clear spell on Thursday afternoon, so I dashed out of work (thanks CHP!) and got the stickers on. This race really does force you to analyse all possible solutions, and jump on opportunities when they arise. The boat now looks fantastic, even if I do say so myself.

We rowed up from our boat’s home in the Albert docks to Tower Bridge on Friday, to meet the photographer. And a jolly nice chap he was too - even if he did think we were nutters. We had some shots of us looking meaningful and brooding in front of Tower Bridge, the Tower, the City and the Mayor’s offices, then got some action shots as we rowed hard upstream to the Tate Modern. I reckon the action shots will come out well, but I’m not sure of my ability to look brooding - I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll look like I’m trying to do “Blue Steel”! Watch this space.

After a break in the afternoon to let the tide go out, we headed off for Richmond, where the boat was going to stay overnight. Having taken a little under 2 hours to row the 10 miles from the docks to Tower Bridge, we expected to set off at 6, row the 17 miles to Richmond and be tucked up in bed by 10. Oh dear. We got the tide a little bit wrong, ended up fighting against it most of the way, and finished rowing at 1.30am! The life of an ocean rower is certainly never dull - and what better way can anybody think of to spend a Friday evening?

The reason for us being in Richmond was that on Saturday we rowed in the Great River Race. This is a race for any type of rowing boat (except modern racing shells), over 22 miles from Richmond to Greenwich. It was conceived by the Thames Company of Watermen and Lightermen as a way to celebrate traditional rowing, and in keeping with its roots, boats have to be fixed seat, and carry a cox and a passenger. There’s a handicap system meaning that all boat types theoretically have an equal chance of winning.

It’s an amazing race, with many boat types that I’ve never even heard of before. Annoyingly they were virtually all quicker than us! But we had a great tussle down the course with one of the other Atlantic boats, and when the swift boats started to come past us at about halfway, it was quite a spectacle. An immensely painful spectacle obviously, as we hauled nearly a tonne of boat down a river for about 4 hours with just our arms and backs, but a spectacle nevertheless.

We didn’t win. We didn’t even win our class, coming second to the Atlantic boat that we tussled with. This doesn’t please me, for sure, but there were extenuating circumstances - specifically that the other crew read the rules better than us, and switched their two rowers for their “passenger and cox” every 15 mins or so. C minus for intelligence, but given that we rowed the whole thing, we were actually pretty happy with our result - which is up on www.greatriverrace.co.uk.

The weekend didn’t quite end there, as we then found the tide was so low that we couldn’t get our boat back into the marina. Cue a night sleeping in the middle of the Thames, attached to a random buoy that we found (yes, we have exciting Saturday nights too). But as I say, this race forces you to think outside the box, and this was just another issue-ette to be overcome. It’ll stand us in good stead come November.