St Catharine's College Boat Club

The weeks of preparation culminated in us sitting in our boat under the Fort St Geoge Bridge freezing to death waiting for the start of Fairbairns. The day hadn't started off particularly well as when we arrived at the boat house we realised that, with two alumni crews and M1 racing in the division before us, we didn't have any blades or a cox box, and they had managed to take our numbers with them too. However, whilst marshalling for the start with our own personally designed and hand crafted numbers,  we felt as prepared as we could be for the 3.6k that was to come.

Rowing up to the start we could see that the alumni and M1 were back and were watching us from the bank so we were determined to show off and do a flying start. Somehow we actually managed this and had the best start of the term which sent us shooting off down the river rating about five pips higher than we had mangaged during the whole rest of term. Despite all being a bit shocked at how easy '33' can feel when we are all doing the same thing at the same time we managed to sustain this for pretty much the whole rest of the race. Our cox, Beth, expertly steered us through all the windy bits and managing to make the corners feel light and easy, which we were extremely grateful for! 

We powered it home down the reach and across the finish line. Once we had managed to detach our frozen claw hands from the blade handles the general feeling was one of satisfaction that we had done everything we could on the day to make the wheel proud. Our efforts were rewarded with a creditable 5th place out of the 12 Cambridge Women's IVs, even beating the two '1927' crews who I have been informed are very good. We beat our result from last year, and were 37 seconds faster (of which I am told the stream only accounts for 15). We would like to say thank you to Georgie Plunkett for coaching us, we could not have done it without you. 

Bring on Lent Term!