Well, here we are back in Richmond, exhausted but so very glad we took advantage of this opportunity close to home. If everything lines up, I think we both plan to go again next year and we hope some other VBC members will attend with us!

Today turned out to be super sunny day....and really humid. First day we had that was almost miserable. Luckily we rowed 8:30 -11 so weren't subject to the stifling middle of the day heat. We arrived at the boathouse to find we were using a new boat today! Surprise. The 4 seat foot stretcher broke yesterday as did the mid boat speaker but we thought the staff would just fix it for us. Guess they didn't have time. With some trepidation we headed out to the Severn River on our new boat -- the "Browne". Turned out it was a D-hull and boy did we like that boat! We set off with the other 8 made up of returning campers. The coaches had us row side by side up the river...and up the river...and up the river. We rowed 7 miles, and that's a nice little row...but then you have to row 7 miles back and geez, a 14 mile row is pretty far in the heat. We weren't out too long before it was clear our boat was going to be faster than the returnees boat. We did numerous pause drill as we moved up the river just to slow our pace enough to keep rowing with the other boat. Once we turned around and headed down river, we did two one minute pieces. We won both, but the other boat had a bad start on one piece and that's not the way we wanted to win. (FYI, we were cranked up to a 35 spm on one of our pieces. Exciting to go that fast, but borderline chaotic. I was struggling at stroke to hold the slide rate down; really being thrown forward. That's where a little more experience under my belt would be helpful.) A long pull brought us back near our creek where we lined up for our last race, 500 metres. Clean starts by both boats but we shot out in front right away. They almost caught us after approx 200 metres but we pulled out ahead and were leading by 4 seats with only about 50 metres to go -- clearly the race was ours, when....oh, you can just guess what's gonna happen next....7 seat caught a crab. We tried to continue on but she couldn't recover the oar so we stopped about five strokes short of the end. She felt so badly but as we all know, it happens sometimes.

The other boat was cool; we congratulated them, but they knew we were the best boat so they didn't gloat about their win. The attached shot is our boat with coach and cox. Our coach's last name is King so we named ourselves "King's Queens" and Karen & I found these little tiaras with flashing lights that we wore all morning and during our race. We made crowns for the guys too. Out boat was a great group and everyone got into the spririt and enjoyed our race accoutrements.

That's it for this outing. Sorry only one pic today. It was a crazy, hot, sweaty, fun, tiring day and we just didn't have time to take any more shots.

Hope you've enjoyed our comments and please think seriously about this camp if you consider yourself a high beginner/intermediate sweep rower. You won't regret it.

Lynne & Karen