Winners: Head of Charles Event

The Head of the Charles is one of the most prestigious Head Races in the world, taking place every October in Boston, over 4750m down stream. This year the event was unable to run due to Covid, so they held a virtual race with all entries rowing 5 kilometres and entering their time as recorded on a SpeedCoach. A SpeedCoach is a sophisticated GPS enabled stopwatch, which gives time, average speed, rate and distance covered.

On Saturday, after the rest of the squad had gone home, and having already raced 3.5 km upstream in their quad, Christina Baxter and Emily Downing recorded a 5 km piece on the Longridge reach in a double scull. The girls rated a steady 28 strokes a minute for the entire piece, looking smooth and powerful the whole way. Their time of 19:54.5 looked good, but they had to wait for all entries to be entered to see how they had done. Entries closed in the early hours of Monday morning , but even so results were not officially released for some time afterwards.

Celebrations abounded when the results came through, they had beaten all the Quad Scull entries and came first in the Doubles event. To win the Junior Doubles as two Year 10 girls is quite remarkable, particularly in such a prestigious international event.  It is fair to suggest that these two young rowers are destined to more impressive successes in the future.