Paul Rosenquist

Arrived here in Cannes on wednsday afternoon. A few days ago.

In a untypical French style everything went like clockwork. Picked up at the airport, welcome to the rowing club, here are your boats (all brand new) and there is your hotel. Ooh yeah, the beach is a 500mtr stroll that way. 20 degrees and a light breeze with a blazing sun…is this really a rowing regatta?

The gulf of Cannes is was like a mirror,….more or less. We quickly rigged our boats, sort of measured quickly through the basic settings and headed of to sea through the narrow channel. The single, double and qoads were all allocated different beaches. Everything felt great. When I got back to the beach later on, I noticed some more well used looking boats. By judging of the shoe sizes I figured it were big strong guys so I decided to measure there oars and rigg a bit. WHO!…major difference with my setup. I was at least 3 gears heavier than they were. I radically changed my settings and noticed a rather dramatic increase in speed. (GPS) GOOD!

The beach now packed with boats and nervous rowers running around. I love the combination of lets say a surfski paddle race (beach) and a rowing regatta. Having the boats fulled with sand and salt water is just part of the game. Next morning the conditions were totally different again. More calm water, but with a nice swell. This is fun! From bouy 3 to 4 you can pick up great surf and I clocked 20km’s and hour on one wave. Keeping up a rowing rythm is more or less scarry than.

Friday afternoon it was race time. Two heats with 20 boats. I watched the first one on which Peter my old double partner was racing in. 42 minutes later he came in winning having won his race with a 58 second lead! Impressive. I knew he was fast as he has been trainging on really bad water in Helsingborg now for a while. After a good warmup I pressed my chronometer down on the 5minute signal. Dispite that I was slow of the start. I quickly tried to achieve a nice boatspeed and noticed I was keeping up with the pack. This is easy I felt. Than I looked over my right shoulder and noticed that one guy (he who I measured his oars and rig from) He was way ahead…DAMN.

Ok, focus..this is a race you idiot…race it! So I focussed on getting as many good full strokes down to the water as possible (not easy with the boat being tossed about). I sort of maneged to link some very good runs and soon was ahead of the pack. After a 1000mtrs I took the lead and just maitained my steady pace. I rounded bouy 2- stopped rowing adjusted my footstrap, reset the GPS for bouy 3 and shot of again. This is a long stretch 3,5km’s more or less againt the waves and wind. Just keep putting down the as many longs strokes as possible. FINALLY I could see bouy three. The turn was fun, getting the swell now nearly 2 mtrs sometimes from behind. 5 hard strokes and your flying. I sort of decided that all the rowers should be able to get their boat to surf, but not all have the power to actually push hard when rowing up the wave…so I decided to really power through those parts. A finished two and a half minutes ahead of the 2nd guy. Relieved. But is will be a hell of a race today!
The conditions are much WORSE! The B finals have allready been cancelled. Can I handle this?

I will try to give everybody a good race….we will see!