OTRC Maintenance Day Great Success!

Groundworks Preparation

Huge thanks to Brian, Rob and Hugh for laying down the weed membrane around the junior quads, in preparation for the groundworks we have planned. A meaningful step forward and it sets us up well for what's coming next.

Blade Maintenance

Thank you to Simon, Mark, Anita and Angela for all the work on the blades. The Swiftly blades now have a set of new (smaller) handles fitted, as do the 2x Women's double Concept2 blades.

A few important updates on the rest of the blade fleet:

• The Swiftly blades are being taken up to the National Championships for Concept2 to replace the sleeves (date TBC, likely 13th/14th June). Going with them: the 6x Concept2 foam handle sweep blades, and potentially a few from the Ukraine and yellow blade sets.
• The 4 Dreher blades upstairs have been investigated. They need end handle wraps fitting, and one of them also needs the end nub installing. We have the wraps in stock, but the end handle pieces are missing - that's something we'll need to source.
• A blade audit report is coming shortly so we know exactly where we stand for the season ahead.
• We've managed to circulate some Drehers back into stock from the back of the boathouse - more on that to follow.

Blade allocation in the meantime:

• White tape → Juniors and Women
• Maroon (Brown) tape → Men and Senior (and large male Juniors!)
• If you're out in Colin Bullock/John Millborne/Swiftly, use the blades prescribed to those boats

Full report will be out / circulated and new poster generated.

Lighting Upgrade

Dick has done an amazing job on the lighting, with help from Jon Heaney - you'll notice we now have brand new LEDs on one side downstairs in the boathouse.

To put this in perspective: the old incandescent bulbs were drawing around 800W to light the boathouse. Once we get the other side converted, the entire lighting setup will pull just 130W in total. That's a transformative reduction, and it means we can run the lights off the battery in Cambridge House.

Jon is also working up a plan for the parts needed to run a cable from the boathouse to Cambridge House, so we can supply power to the boathouse whenever it's needed. An exciting bit of infrastructure work that opens up a lot of possibilities for us.

Everywhere Else

• Mark Felton did a fantastic job mowing various parts of the circuit
• Claire was her brilliant self, busy absolutely everywhere
• Thank you Sue for helping move all that rubbish down
• Nick was a huge help cleaning out the trailers
• Sorry if I've missed anyone!!

In Closing

Genuinely a fantastic day at OTRC. Everyone worked incredibly hard in tough conditions and huge progress has been made on multiple fronts. Thank you all - the club is in better shape tonight than it was this morning, and that's entirely down to you.

See you on the water.