Our extremely competitive masters spread their wings and took off for Italy over the weekend to compete in the Lake Orta Challenge. Lake Orta lies just to the west of Lake Maggiore, a beautiful setting for this two-day event, with eights racing over a 6 km course on Saturday and single sculls on Sunday. The course circumnavigates an island in the middle of the lake and there has to be a compromise in steering between taking the shortest course and getting a good line to get round the buoys. Some eights, intentionally or otherwise, took the short route and then peformed what might be called a handbrake turn around a buoy.
Tom Bishop takes up the story:
The Supervets took an eight and some scullers to Lake Orta in Italy for The Lake Orta Challenge, based in Orta San Guilio, a beautiful old lake side Italian town and world heritage site. We were going to trail boats but couldn’t find a tow, so in the end we rented Filippi boats from the very helpful Stefano Basalini who ran the event for his club. He has seven World Lightweight golds and two silvers – so understood the need for good boats.
Saturday’s 8’s race crew was: Huw Jones (bow), Graham Bagnall, Slavo Radosevic, Tom Bishop, Darko Miksic, Andy Tompkins, Rod Stewart, Ian Hyslop (Str), Cox Hilary Cook. We raced the 6km around the lake against 52 other crews and whilst being by far the oldest masters managed to come 6th on raw time in masters ( there was no handicapping) . The rental Filippi 8 was a bit small in the mid lake rough water! We raced around two buoys and an island having to do handbrake turns to get around the near 180 degree turns. Hilary very ably navigated the turns and enabled us to hold off the crew behind who seemed to be closing in. As a result of our better turns we held them off to beat them on time by 2 sec. They were perhaps 20 years younger than us. A cause for a few beers in our green goodie bag hats.
Sunday: Three of us braved the lake once again in rented singles. Rod Stewart Tom Bishop in vet I and Hilary Cook in Women’s Vet G. The mass start of 122 scullers was crazy with many crashes and much shouting. After the first leg of race it was out into the midddle and challenging water to go around the island and then back to the finish. Hilary won her race and Rod and I were the only ones in Vet Iso we both got a prize of a saucepan (bit different from pint tankards). I was amused to have my hand shaken by a much younger fellow competitor who said he was so pleased he could look forward to the future in sculling seeing that I was still doing it at vet I.
Greater detail and pictures on the Lake Orta Challenge website (it was a challenge).
Follow the links for Saturday’s overall results and results by category. Similarly follow the links for Sunday’s overall results and results by category.
Editor’s note
Looking at the masters results for the eights event, it is interesting to note that the average age of our crew was 73.25, while the average ages of the five faster masters were 55.625, 53.0, 41.625, 47.0 and 45.75. Quite an age difference!
