Sophie’s first regatta

And so it begins again...... I’ve decided to plough on in the present to get the blog up and running - one day I’ll fill in the missing year or so.

Peter and I got up around 5 yesterday morning to take Sophie to her very first regatta, on the Barwon River in Geelong. We dropped Jessye off at the Yarra on the way where she was training with the Mercantile Club’s under-23 Eight. She was very pleased to be selected for this crew recently and will be racing with them this season.

But back to Sophie... she’s been enjoying her first term of rowing at MLC and we were interested to see how our still rather slight 13-yr-old would cope with her first 1000m race. Her crew was in the Coxed Quad Division 4 - a quad’s where they have two oars each. Jessye thought that she started her rowing career in Division 4 too, back in Year 8. I was very pleasantly surprised to watch their heat and especially their C Final (the final for the crews that came 3rd in their heats) because they really looked like they knew what they were doing! My surprise was due to the fact that the only time I’d seen Sophie row previously was when I picked her up from the Yarra one day and got there in time to see her crew turn around and row back to the sheds. On that occasion they appeared to be making no effort to move their oars at the same time as the person in front of them.

They powered away to a convincing win over the other MLC crew and some other school in their final, coming away from their first outing quietly satisfied. Next week we’ll be at the Yarra cheering Jessye on in her first race of the season, the Melbourne Head, a 4km race ending at the city boatsheds.