30/12/06

Upper Thames Christmas Pudding Regatta

Finding a date for the Christmas Pudding Eights ‘regatta’ at Upper Thames Rowing Club wasn’t easy this year. Christmas Eve was not a popular choice and the weather forecast made postponement to early May singularly attractive. But Saturday 30th December was finally chosen and what a window of opportunity the Club found, with clear blue skies, no more than a fresh breeze, mild temperatures and no rain.

Held every year, the regatta is intended to give each member of the Club an opportunity to row with other members with different levels of experience. Entrants’ names were put into a hat after they had paid an entrance fee of £5 which included lunch and limitless supplies of hot wine cordial the constituents of which were alleged by some to have powered the V-2 rocket. Names are pulled out of the hat and selected through a seeding process designed to ensure so far as possible, that each crew included senior men and women rowers, veterans and novices. Forty entrants made up five eights and, as has happened so often in previous years, racing proved to be remarkably close over the 500 metre course downstream from below Phyllis Court to the finish at the UTRC Clubhouse.

The winning ‘A’ crew beat the ‘C’ crew by less than half a length. Crew members: Jim Rutland (bow) Libby Henshilwood, Paul Hamilton, Martin Dawes, Richard Moody, Will Satch, Ben Webb, Adam Rennie (stroke) and Becks Sadler (cox).

After a lunch provided by Juliet Machan (the Upper Thames captain) and her team, prizes of individual Christmas puddings were presented to the members of the winning crew by Peter Sutherland, the joint Founder (with Diane Sutherland) and President of Upper Thames Rowing Club. The President also presented to John Pilgrim-Morris, the Upper Thames Head Coach, a birthday cake to mark JPM’s 70th birthday which fell on the next day, Sunday 31st December.