Gloucester Regatta, 23rd August
25th August, 2025
Early Saturday morning felt rather like groundhog day for Liz, Juliet, Heidi and Katrina who found themselves back at the club preparing for yet another regatta!
Our light trailer whisked the quad and double off up to Gloucester where Juliet and Liz were entered into the WE2x and all the girls entered into the WE4x.
Liz and Juliet were up first against a double from Gloucester. The fact that they had home advantage wasn’t our only concern – we were in a boat that we had never trained in (due to our usual boat sustaining an injury a few days before) and we’d had, let’s say, limited success with steering in a previous race.
So the usual questions about “why the heck we do this to ourselves”, and “what were we thinking entering this race?” accompanied us as we took ourselves up to the start line. But then a miracle happened, as they do – all came well in the actual race.
We had a great start and got ahead quickly, only really having to correct our course once to avoid the other crew on a narrow piece of the canal. What was billed as a 500m race, turned out to be closer to 600m but we came over the line with a decent win. Steering confidence restored, we had four hours to kill before our quad races so we sat on the riverbank eating lunch and cheering on a variety of amazing junior and masters crews as they went past.
Our semi-final was against a crew from Warwick. Having gathered ourselves at the start line, both crews had a good, fast start but we soon pulled ahead. All was going brilliantly until both crews were half-way down the course where we were stopped by an umpire due to a crew crashing into the side in the previous race. So round we turned, and headed back up to start again!
Version two of the race started in much the same way and – expertly steered by Katrina – our boat took the lead and sustained it to the end for a comfortable win.
However, the hard part was yet to come – the final against Exeter. They were fresh on the river with a straight final, and we didn’t have time to land again so went straight back down the river! But full of confidence from our previous win, and with Katrina’s steering, Heidi’s bullish pace at stroke and Liz and Juliet piling down some power in the middle we were soon ahead of Exeter and with the last piece of energy we had, pulled across the finish line first.
A really great day, which rewarded us for the many months of training we’ve been putting in. Huge thanks to Andy Tyler for giving up his day to tow the trailer, and to Mark Melbourne for cycling all the way from Bath – both gave us much-appreciated encouragement, loud shouting from the bank and great videos to dissect!
Gloucester today, the Worlds tomorrow (well….in two weeks time!).
