OPUS rowing

Hey all,

The last two weekends have been all about rowing. Believe it or not, I actually made it through 6 weeks of getting up at 5:30am every Tuesday and Thursday. And Andrea, bless her heart, managed to make it through 6 weeks of having me getting up at 5:30am every Tuesday and Thursday and didn't actually kill me. So all the training culminated in two weekends of races. The first race was all indoors on rowing machine (ergs). Our team of 8 faced off against several others at one of the local bars in town. Each person was required to row 500 meters before switching off to the next teammate. During our instructions we were explicitly told the location of the chuck bucket just in case.

This could be the worst picture of me...EVER. Truth is nobody looks good on an erg machine. Right?!?!?

We ended up coming in second place to one of our local rival engineering companies. But I happily didn't succumb to the chuck bucket and was able to enjoy a well deserved beer afterwards.

Before the start of things on Saturday.

The following weekend was the outdoor race. We arrived at Lake Waihola (30 min south of Dunedin) at 7:30 in the morning 'almost' ready to go. The morning started out with a mild wind that got progressively stronger as the morning went on. We were the third race of the morning and by that time the wind had developed to the point where white caps were starting to appear on the water. Our first race started out very poorly with us running into the boat on our left after 3 strokes. We were slightly ahead so we continued on into the wind. We caught up to the boat on our right that was in the lead and then, of course, we ran into them too. All ahead ramming speed!!! We didn't come out ahead in that one and ended second. We were luckily not disqualified and then unluckily told to rerace. Boo. The rerace was exhausting and totally pointless as the results mirrored our first race.

As we waited for our next race one the wind picked up even more and one of the other teams boat actually sunk.

Glad this wasn't us.

After waiting around for another hours as they removed the crew and boat from the water they decided to scratch the rest of the races that day and finish up on Sunday.

And what a difference a day makes. The weather was beautiful without wind. We had three races sunday. I was in the first and third races and got to sit out the semi finals. We won the first race although I broke the bracket holding my oar in place on the first stroke. (I wish I could say it was because I pulled so hard, but I believe it's more likely the craftmanship of the boat. One of our rowers blew his stirrups out during the finals and some of the other teams had some problems as well)

Here's us during the first race on Sunday. (I'm second from left)

The semi final race we came in second but were fast enough to qualify for the 3 team final race.

Here's what happens when you catch a crab. Despite doing this the team below still managed to beat us (we're the top boat).

The final race was pretty exciting by rowing standards. We got off to a good start and were neck and neck with another engineering team all the way down. We narrowly edged out the other team by fractions of a second.