12th Southeast Asian Rowing Championship

A long overdue report. Sorry to all. Haven’t been able to find the time to update on the happenings, until now.
Wasn’t exactly the most pleasant of race experience. Mauled by incomplete boats, lack of help and poor time management. There are endless lessons to be learnt.
Arrived in Pattaya at what I would say would be very bad timing. In short, wasted the entire travelling and had no time to do anything rowing related. The boat that was allocated to me didn’t have a footplate, no shoes, and a seat with a dented wheel. So not only did I have to rig the boat, I now had to fix in an entire footplate. And the footplate given to me had a cracked bracket. No one from the organizing committee was around promptly to provide the necessary spares. I just had to scamper around the race site, hoping to find a spare footplate bracket. And it’s not exactly something one would bring along when travelling. Huge mistake to neglect proper rigging of the boat.
A decent performance in the preliminary race. Just needed the boat to be more stable. I was pretty much left on my own to figure out how to set the boat up better, given the circumstances. Managed to get help couple of hours before the finals. We both agreed that we just had to bite the bullet and go.
Bad starts with a crab, but was still just a boat length down. wind was pushing me to bow side, so I spent half the time down the course correcting direction. Bugger. Super hard effort and high rates to stay in medal contention. The boat just wasn’t gliding. Caught another one of many crabs as I crossed the line and went swimming. At least it was worth a 3rd place.
Pictures will be up soon!