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Last week I had a problem...John and I have two Coxed Quads for each of our top two crews, Albano for the 2nd Crew and Corbervois for the 1st Crew. Corbervois is a carbon shell based on a lightweight coxless quad design and is about 2 or three seasons old, and Albano is the same shape, but made of kevlar honeycomb and a bit of carbon and is about 9 seasons old.
Camp last week saw our athletes race competitively against each other in these two boats, and John's 3rd Crew in Albano was out-performing my 1st Crew in Corbervois.
Holy crap... was all we could say.
The girls were complaining a bit about Corbervios sitting on stroke side (starboard side) during the pieces, and so the only thing that I could think of was that Albano was set up better than Corbs since John and myself had been going insane to make sure that we had selected girls for the 1st Crew that were superior than the 3rds on paper. So I spent about 5 hours on Saturday evening after we arrived back from camp running through Corbervois to try and get it set up at base (average) settings, and I was panicking before this morning's session about whether it would make a difference, or whether it would just make it worse.
I held my breath as I approached my crew sitting in Corbervois at the top of the lake after their warm-up. All of the girls kinda spoke in unison and I got pelted with a very shrieky, "Holy SHIT Matt...! Whatever you did... it's awesome!", and I almost fell out of the launch with relief.
We went on to have a great session, although the heights were a little high for my 5 foot 3 inch stroke. Those hours spent slaving away on a Saturday evening had really paid off... so with a bit of tweaking and some good luck, I should have the rig just right by Boat Race in 13 weeks time.
