Saturday was for practice, and Sunday for racing. For the races, the crews all donned matching shirts. For some reason, my action shots from the races didn’t turn out very well, so all of the following were from practice, when people just paddled in their street clothes.
The boats have a crew of about 20, plus minus 1 or 2.
The front half paddle sitting down. The first 3 rows are singles, the next few are doubles. They all keep up a crazy high cadence. Are the narrow paddles cause or effect of that?
The back half of the boat paddle standing up, and at a much lower cadence. The last paddler steers, but only sometimes. I think the boats are mostly just well aimed at the start.
When everything goes well, the boats move with impressive alacrity:
But sometimes things don’t go as well as you would hope:
Note the bare-chested paddler in the 5th row. Here’s a close-up:
On the next few runs of this boat, we didn’t see him onboard anymore.
Perhaps their offering fell off in the heat of battle, and the gods were not amused? Their competitors in this boat were booking along at a good clip, probably thanks in no small part to epoxy. 🙂
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