Here is our track, as measured by my GPS watch:
But before worrying about the numbers: how was it for you, darling? I thought we were solid, fairly workmanlike, but not at all inspired; we lacked zing and sparkle. Admittedly it isn't easy to sparkle on a cold grey winter morning, but still we need to try. So other than the hard-to-define pizzazz (an attractive combination of vitality and glamour), what was missing? In no very coherent order: a lack of length at finish but perhaps more at the catch; related to or caused by an inability to trust the balance well enough to reach properly around riggers at the catch (but also caused by some ugly leaning-away-from-riggers at the finish. Tut!). And hard to see but I think possible to feel: a failure to all pull together with the same strength at the same times (both time during the stroke and time during the race) which leads to relative motion of different blades which is inefficient.
Based on the (GPS track) the course is 1950 m not 2000 m as advertised. However, the same GPS track truncates our time, so more probably the course is indeed exactly 2000 m. Reading from the GPS track, our times were:
First leg: 7 mins (or a touch over, its difficult to time end points exactly). Second leg 7:38. Total 14:38.
Which is not the same as 15:08, indeed it is 30 secs adrift, which I'll count as 7.5 secs extra added to the start and end of each piece. So the adjusted times are 7:15 and 7:53, for 2000 m.
The first leg (red) is downstream and is clearly faster than the second (blue) upstream. The first ends at ~16 km/h i.e. 1:52 ish, but remember that is speed-over-ground not speed-over-water. The second bottoms at perhaps 15, i.e. 2:00, for an average of 1:56. Which would make the river speed... perhaps 0.5 km/h, which is... 1.8 m/s. In the plausible range, anyway, though that seems a touch high.
Top speed was 19.5 km/h (=1:32) off the start on leg 1, and 17.5 (=1:43) on leg 2. Which suggests the obvious: that we were more tired on leg 2, in which case my estimate of river speed is too high, as I suspected.
If you're not used to km/h and prefer splits (like me) here is a handy conversion table, possibly accurate:
19 1:34.7 18.5 1:37.3 18 1:40.0 17.5 1:42.9 17 1:45.9 16.5 1:49.1 16 1:52.5 15.5 1:56.1 15 2:00.0 14.5 2:04.1 14 2:08.6
First novice boat was 16:04, so had we thrown our Point out we would probably have won novice. However, a better option for winning things is to learn how to row better :-).
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