By Mr McEwen (Assistant Head Rowing Coach)
On Friday 14th November, we took two crews to London for the Junior Fours Head. 274 crews raced in a time trial format over a 6.8km course on the tideway that is the reverse of what the Boat Race crews face. This is the first time this event has run, but already the level of competition was high as almost all of the top schools and clubs in the country were represented there.
We luckily managed to avoid the worst of storm Claudia with only a few heavy showers throughout the day, but more importantly conditions were relatively mild and still which allowed both crews to execute clean races. Both our WJ18 4+, and WJ16 4+ finished in 11th place in their categories with times of 23:18.8, and 24:12.1 respectively. A really strong result at this point in the season, but still with plenty of things to work on to find even more boat speed.
On Sunday 16th November the whole club attended our second home race of the year, Star Autumn Head. We had to break out the wellies for boating as the recent rain caused the river to overflow the landing stage. This did not dampen any spirits however, and all 13 crews from BGS took to the water and raced well. Overall we came away with six wins, three second places, and one third place. The winning crews were our W 8+, WJ15 8+, W 4+, WJ16 4+, WJ17 1x, WJ16 1x.
This was our Year 9s first ever head race and both WJ14 8x+ were fortunate to have coxes from the J15 squad to help them through this new experience. With this expert guidance all of the rowers had an enjoyable run down the course and posted competitive times against some strong opposition.
For our J15 squad this was their first sweep race after only two weeks of learning the nuances of this different style of rowing. All four crews demonstrated how quickly they had made these changes, with two 8s finishing within 2 seconds of each other in 1st and 2nd place in their category, and the J15 coxed four only coming second in their category to a crew from the year above.
A huge thank you to all the parents and supporters who made their way to both races to cheer on the crews. We now look forward to our last event before the end of term Wallingford 4s&8s on Sunday 30th November.
