Dear Member,

By now I'm sure you will be fully paid up, and will no doubt have also sent in your completed membership forms, thus ensuring another year of trouble free membership at early bird discount rates - well done.

OK. Who's the most important person at UTRC? Answer: Austen Dorey. I'm delighted to tell you that we now have a boatman, called Austen, who is also the full time Shiplake College boatman.

Austen will generally be down at the club on Saturday and Sunday mornings, as well as one night during the week. His job will be to keep our fleet in working order, so that we minimise the problems we have always had with boat maintenance.

It may surprise you to know we have 19 fours in the boathouse, as well as 25 pairs / doubles. Strangely, we only seem to want to use four or five of each, and we tend to claim that the others are "broken", or "too big / small", or "the wrong shape", or, the old classic and my personal favourite, "not fast enough".

In short, we need a culture change. However, I realise that it will help considerably if our equipment is at least functional. Often a sizeable percentage of our kit is out of commission for some reason or other.

Over time, we will be upgrading our equipment, but we will also be sharing our boats amongst squads more often.

There will no longer be specific men's, women's or juniors' boats, but rather we will focus usage on the standard and aspiration of the crew. The very best junior crews will now be able to use the best senior boats, and likewise elite lightweight men might use elite heavyweight women's equipment etc. This does not mean intermediates or occasional experts can use the elite boats though.

If we all want better boats to row in, this can be achieved through sharing, upgrading and through better maintenance.

Austen will therefore play a central role in the working life of UTRC, and will arguably become the most important person in the club. Be warned that he will be telling us from time to time that we cannot use our favourite boat, and even though this may cause temporary inconvenience, I will be backing him fully in his decisions on maintenance issues.

We have always been very lucky to have a good fleet, but when a part is missing our first instinct has often been to simply take it from another boat. This eventually leads to most boats being incomplete, and hence less equipment for us all.

So Austen is the answer, and we must make him very welcome.

One further very important point. Don't even think about him mending your single. There is a mountain of work for him to do on club equipment, and he already has a full time job at Shiplake. His work will be prioritised by me in the interests of UTRC, and we must not overwhelm him with private requests.

Since Austen will be carrying out most repairs himself at Shiplake, as well as maintaining the school's boats, I envisage that it will take a full year before he has been through the fleet (by which time there will be another year's worth of repairs to do). So private work will not be allowed without first speaking to me. Gentle steer: expect the answer "no".

I hope you agree that this is a very important step in our club's future development, and I really hope it helps us to focus on what's important at UTRC - the rowing.



As usual, any and all comments welcome,

Best wishes,

Justin