Rowing.

Head of the Housatonic 13th annual Regatta, sponsored by the New Haven Rowing Clug, October 6, 2007.This was such a great day to remember. It was my first race after rowing now for 5 months, and was our first race as a team in a quad. It was such fun to row with Irene Lysenko (bow- she guides the boat from the back), Monique Ames (stroke- she sets the stroke rate and ratio), and Kristen Brown. It was quite a sight, with over 800 boats participating, from high school students to college to masters (29 and above, which we clearly are), and with boats including singles, doubles, quads, 8's, etc. (It was fun to see, as we rowed back to shore, that we were finishing along side of the Yale University crew! What other sport allows you to do that at this age!)We rowed a total of about 7 miles, the race itself being 2.7 miles. It kind of felt like the "marathon" of rowing, as other regattas are just a thousand meters. Being the newest team at Maritime Rowing Club (i.e., at the bottom of the pecking order), we got assigned the last boat left, the "Victorious", a wood "antique" boat. (Even though it did win the Nationals in the 80's, it is is much heavier than newer boats, and ought to carry a couple of minutes handicap at least, in our opinion!) The race was held on the beautiful, calm waters of the Housatonic River, lined by beautiful trees that were showing the colors of fall. It was a beautiful day at 95 degrees! (We've dropped 50 degrees in the week since). This was a Head style race, where boats start separately and are individually timed, instead of all lining up together and racing side by side. We launched from the Indian Well State Park off route 10 in Shelton, CT, wading our boat into the water from the park's sandy beach, and joining the hoards of boats on the water as we rowed toward the start line. It was quite an obstacle course as Irene guided us to avoid hitting any of them, or the sand bar we had been warned about. (We were secretly happy to see that it was a girls 8 that got stuck on the sand bar instead of us! -- at least we knew where it was then). We finished in the respectable time of 21.30.275, sixth in our division!! (Bryan perceptively asked, Mom, how many boats were in your division?...well, we won't focus on that.) In raw time, we were just 2 seconds behind 5th place (rats!), and 3.34 min utes behind 1st (a team from our club that has been rowing 10 years)!! We were thrilled to finish and to do well, with no mistakes! For me personally, it felt like a victory lap to have come to this point. Can't wait until the next race. What fun!