Race

On Saturday morning we had our first "race" as a rowing team. It was at Newport Beach which is near LA and to be on the water at 8 am on Saturday, we left Santa Barbara in the evening and stayed with the parents of a team mate. That was super nice and interesting because I saw an actual American home and the family was really nice, providing us with pizza, drinks and breakfast and coffee in the morning. Although you're not hungry at 4:30 am when you get up, eating something before a competition is a really good idea ;)

At Newport Beach.

 
I think we were on the water at around 07:30 am and it was already getting really warm! We had to race for 10 min with a certain split (number of strokes per minute) and who got furthest, won the race. But during the first twenty seconds, two boats crashed! We had to re-start etc. After some time we were finally rowing together which was fantastic! The boat becomes faster and it feels lighter.

After cleaning the boats we went to a shopping mall to get lunch and there was already a Christmas tree built up! But we were wearing shorts and rowing T-shirts - we still have to work on the Christmas atmosphere a bit ;)