Although most people have now gone home for the holidays, there were a few of us still kicking around, anxious to be back in a boat. On Saturday, City of Cambridge Rowing Club put on their annual Christmas Head – a 1.6km race. where crews row up towards the boathouses. After all the hard work at the Fairbairns races, for both seniors and novices, this was a fun race with which to end the term (complete with fancy dress).

The Seniors were able to compete in a four, kindly lent to us from Emmanuel Boathouse. With only 2 outings, along with a change from our usual bowsider to a strokesider stroke, it took some time for things to fall into place. Complete with our Christmas Jumpers, ranging from stockings to gingerbread men, we came up to the start line and commenced our rolling start. Along the course, the pair which set off behind us was slowly closing up and we managed to hold them off till the Elizabeth Way bridge (at about 500m still to go). They didn’t manage to overtake us though – despite our moving to the side, they crashed against the canal boats so we were still able to cross the line first. Our time was 8.28 and we were 8 seconds off the next fastest boat, as well as 28 seconds off the overall 4+ winnner. Although not as strong as our row at Fairbairns, for the limited time we had to prepare for the race, we were happy with the result – after all, can’t take anything in fancy dress too seriously!

The novices put in another strong performance and were catching up to the crew in front from the start. About halfway through the course they had overlap with the bow and the other boat’s stern but the other crew moved more closely into our boat, and our novices crashed. After a quick push off and reset, they went for another start sequence and were once again closing the gap between them and the other crew. Luckily there were no more incidents but the novices powered on up to the line and completed the course in a time of 9.17. Had it not been for the crash they could have gotten a much lower time, and could have been much closer to the Women’s Novice Winners (Anglia Ruskin University) who has a time of 8.23.

For both novices and senior crews, the results were not exactly what we had hoped for but  it was a fun race with which to end the term and will have given us more fire to come back at the start of next term to do even better.