Four eventful outings in glorious sunshine in an effort to get ourselves into shape for the next weekend’s regatta. Four outings in which huge amounts of energy was expended, making us all feel like we have an excellent chance in performing suitably well in the first regatta for the eight of season.
Cox made the ultimate sacrifice for the outings, not taking the camera despite the fact that there would have been an enormous amount to record. Mayflies were out in force, swifts were flying all over the place, making the swallows look somewhat clumsy. And to add to the excitement there had been numerous hatchings of various birds which gave us all something to look at.
The regatta enclosure was sporting the world renown blue and white stripes on the front of boat tents, and some helpful persons had put booms into the river in an attempt to bring racing spirit to the masses, something we were only too happy to embrace.
Sadly for us with the arrival of the warmer weather and the prospect of the regatta just weeks away it means that lots of visitors descend on Henley. This means that instead of having to share the river with Upper Thames, Phyllis Court and Leander, we instead have to share it with a load of other crews who don’t always follow the navigation which the environmental agency have put down for our guidance. It certainly can be difficult to spot big blue signs of keep right, and even more difficult to follow them.
In getting into the spirit of racing we took on various boats as competition for side by side racing. Upper Thames sadly had already paired up so didn’t offer us a race, indeed, being such nice people we executed two beautiful handbrake turns to give them a clear run. A quad (same number of blades so should have been able to keep up) and a single were deemed worthy prey. Both of which were annihilated by us, although the single was much quicker off the start. It was generally agreed that our racing starts were excellent after a bit of practice and that we had a nicely balanced boat which would carry us to victory, despite Cox having a seat which they didn’t fit into.
On wildlife watch (narrowly avoiding collision as we were so engrossed at watching a cormorant in a tree) the crew put in a good viewing. Two broods of cygnets were observed, several broods of Canadian goslings, a small nest of very ugly looking coots, mallard ducklings, and the Egyptian goslings sighted a few weeks ago are still alive and getting bigger. A grey wagtail found amusement on the booms conveniently left lying around on the river, and the common tern was noted to be very aerodynamic although should really work on its noise.
Fingers crossed for next weekend, hopefully a nice day with a good race.
MastersofHenley 