A select (well at least that's what they thought) group of the men's senior and masters squad travelled to Poznan in Poland for the FISA World Masters. David Law, Slavo, Mick, Reg, Ian 'Andy', David Phillips, Alex, Pete and Jon all raced in between 5 to 7 events, sometimes in scratch crews. Travel to Poznan was hard work for the group that flew to Berlin – but the many stops were for traffic jams and not for the 24 hour 'nightclubs' along the trucking route. The team stayed in the town, a few km from Lake Malta, and on the Wednesday jumped into the Mercedes van to have a look at the excellent facilities and rig the boats that had come across on the UTRC trailer (many thanks Clive)… before heading out to the town for piles of polish dumplings the size of Cornish pasties, and a beer.
The first 2 days were marred by a cold howling wind, making the 2nd 500m of the course very bumpy indeed: especially for the B4- and A2x on the Thursday. Despite the weather, the regatta ran exactly to time with races every 4 minutes, often with 8 crews per race. On Thursday everyone got to race, representing Ardingly in D4-, E2x, C4-, D4x (1 place behind Tees again!), B4x, C2x and Andy rowing for Dart Totnes in F2x and F4x
The roll call for Saturday was even longer – B2x (x2), D2x (x2), A4x, E2-, C4x, F1x and 8 of the 9 even entered C8+ …made possible by borrowing the UTRC Empacher and a passing American cox called Andy. Lots of confusion ensued as 'easy' means 'light paddling' in the US and Andy was confused when the crew stopped rowing after every burst in the warm up! Slavo in particular enjoyed his discussion about 'start line yoga' when we were attached to the stakeboat.
As for results – sadly no medals for Ardingly. 'Andy' Andrews was closet with 2 second places, and there were some notable performances: the C4- was well in the middle of all times posted for the event and the B2x raced well in a fast heat, overhauling a huge Dynamo Moscow crew to finish 5th of 8, in the top half of all entries in the event, and closing the gap on the German heat winners to 6s from over 12s in the A2x event 2 days earlier. In the other B2x Jon and Pete enjoyed a storming race not far from the leaders. And the C8+ blasted off the start and did very respectably for a completely scratch combination. Most Ardingly results were 5th, 6th or 7th. None of the crews felt that they had a bad race (apart from the A2x), and all enjoyed the level of competition and hard racing - it was simply that the standard was very high. There were a lot of very well drilled, very big crews, many with past pedigree.
What can we learn? That the German, Russian and Polish crews were all uniformly massive; that everyone rated very very high; that Ardingly crews generally have good starts; that ARC is not full of ex-internationals; that the umpires don’t like non-matching t-shirts under one-pieces; that we need more accuracy of placement at the catch; that Gina and George’s support and lunches were brilliant (thanks!); that the organisation and atmosphere at the Masters is great; that we all looked very smart in our matching tops sponsored by AXIS (cheers Reg); and that zurek is a soup that comes inside a bowl made out of a breadroll the size of an adult human head!
