St Catharine's College Boat Club

Carnage saved Pembroke II from our deliverence of spoons in Lents, and we were determined it wouldn't be the same today. However, they'd managed to hold Corpus to 300m from the finish the previous day, so we knew it wouldn't be easy.

Rather strangely, there was a tailwind on the reach, meaning the course would be even shorter than usual. But the plan was to go long, concentrate on pushing off Emma again, and then really apply the pressure to Pembroke over the reach. The start of the race was fairly familiar, we hit our solid rhythm in the gut and were rewarded with one whistle, obtaining two when we went past the Plough. At this point Emma had got to one length, but then faded much harder than in previous days.

Pembroke held us at half a length for what seemed like an eternity. We started to move again at the kink, getting to about a quarter of a length just before the bridge, where Adrian decided an up 2 was required. At this point we moved up onto overlap, and after 10 strokes of sitting there, bouncing over the stern, we finally got the satisfying feeling of blade on stern at Morley's Holt. Just like the last day of Lents!

Unfortunately, this long race took its toll when we had to row as the sandwich boat. The much hyped plan of a 3 minute sprint was great, but turned into a 90 second sprint followed by 90 seconds of attempted sprint ("do it for the children!") followed by 6 minutes of pain. We took very little, if any, distance out of Corpus, and ended up many lengths behind, rowing the second half of the course at 30.

However, the objective had been achieved - a well-deserved bump after a long, hard week. Congratulations to the crew on a successful term that's included wins at Head of the Cam and Head-to-Head, a 99s regatta campaign that only ended with a defeat to a blading Darwin crew, and a return to the second division after 5 years. Many thanks to Chris Quarton and James Bywater (and Dr Scales!) for their coaching, James Wagstaff for stepping in at the last minute, and the rest of the crew for their dedication to training this term. Onwards and upwards next year!