Now it’s been a while since our last post on here. You might think that we haven’t been up to much but that’s where you’d be wrong. It’s because we’ve all been too busy to write anything up!

After a fantastic end to last year our new Director of Rowing, Jamie Smith, kicked off this year with a pre-season camp to get us all back into the swing of things which saw a lot of new faces (amongst the more familiar ones) before classes started.

Then we did some serious recruiting at Freshers’ Fair with a 200m erg challenge that everyone wanted to get involved in….

This resulted in a huge number of people becoming members of the Boat Club. We’ve had some great training sessions (and socials!) over the last couple of months and all squads are making good progress. We’ve even tried a bit of netball before swiftly realizing that we’re definitely better suited to rowing…

The first race of the year that we entered was Fours Head which saw the top women’s 4 come an impressive 6th in their category (W IM2 4+). The crew were slightly disappointed with the result though this is the best that a UCL crew has ever done and is a good indication of the big aims that the club has as a whole.

A couple of weekends ago, the novices went off to Cambridge for their first taste of racing and had a successful day, with the novice women missing first place by one second and the novice men placing 7th and 15th in the beginner category and 14th in the novice category too.

Last Wednesday saw hoards of UCLBC rowers descend on Imperial College Boat House for the BUCS Indoor Rowing Series. The atmosphere was electric with huge support from those about to race or those who’d just finished their own race. This resulted in some awesome performances across all the squads. Spot all the purple and blue in the video below…

http://rowhub.com/2014-bucs-indoor-rowing-imperial-college/

That very evening also saw the arrival of UCLBC’s newest member of its fleet – the new Hudson 4+, which made for a very happy Jamie!

Sunday marked the annual UH Sprints, and the novice squad’s introduction to side-by-side racing! Both the men and women had impressive results, with the men reaching the final and the women racing each other in a UCL v UCL final.

And now we’re preparing for our first weekend away as a whole club as we’re off to Newcastle to race at Rutherford Head, and then have a mini social tour after all the racing is done! There’s nearly 80 of us heading up North with two 8s entered from each squad and the senior squads also entering two 4s each.  So watch this space to hear how we did and if we survived the 6 hour coach ride home the morning after the night before….