For people of a certain age who were at Quidi Vidi Lake Wednesday, the sound of a Lovin’ Spoonful song playing in their heads might have drowned out the diddly-diddly of the ‘The Banks of Newfoundland” coming from the marquee side of the pond.
“Hot town, summer in the city…” begins the 1966 tune, and that certainly was the case in St. John’s, where temperatures touched 30 degrees on Regatta Day, setting a new record for the date and this summer.
That might have been the record of note for the 2018 Royal St. John’s Regatta had it not been for the superlative performance of the m5 women in what passed for the cool of the morning, in a race that began at 7:40 a.m., which is before regular Regattas even start.
But this wasn’t any regular Regatta. It had been deemed the event’s 200th anniversary and as such, drew over 150 crews, more than 50 percent greater than had been the case in recent years.
The vast majority of those entries were female, but it was m5 — cox Dean Hammond, stroke Katie Wadden, Alyssa Devereaux, Jane Brodie, Nancy Beaton, Amanda Ryan Amanda Hancock, coached by Bert Hickey — that was the unquestioned headliner, not just because they were two-time defending champions, but also because they were so focused on setting a new course record, the possibility of which was increased when the team rowed an unofficial record in a practice dash up and down Quidi Vidi last week.
They fulfilled all that promise in Wednesday’s women’s amateur race, winning as expected, and setting a new record as hoped, crossing the line in four minutes and 56.1 seconds, just bettering, by six-tenths of a second, a 15-year-old standard established by OZ-FM in 2003.
M5 would go on to easily claim the women’s championship Wednesday evening, but conditions weren’t quite as favourable, resulting in a winning time of 5:03.35. That was still about 14 seconds ahead of Smith Stockley, the crew that had also been the runner-up in the morning amateur race.
The same weather — a westerly breeze blowing towards the rowers during the second half of the race — almost certainly played a role in preventing the Outer Cove men’s crew, which also captured a third straight championship Wednesday, from emulating m5 in setting a course record.
Outer Covve — Brent Hickey, James Cadigan, Daniel Cadigan, Mark Perry, Brent Payne, Colin Stapleton, coxswain Mark Hayward and also coached by Bert Hickey — had come fairly close 12 hours earlier, in the first race of the day, when they rowed an 8:55.90, their best-ever time and one of the fastest evet in Regatta history, but they were still more than four seconds off the course record time of 8:51.32 set by Crosbie Industrial Services in winning the 2007 men’s championship.
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There might have been even juicier championship-race story lines Wednesday had the OZ-FM women’s masters crew, made up mostly of the 2003 record-setters, made it to the women’s championship as one of the five fastest female teams on the day (they were seventh). Or if Smith Stockley, also sponsors of the men’s runners-up in the first and last races of day, had been more of a challenger to Outer Cove (they were more than 20 seconds behind in the final), which would have rekindled the memories of the great rivalry between teams that carried those banners almost three decades ago.
Still, this had to be seen as a successful Regatta, if only because they got it all in.
With 35 races, there was a 7 a.m. start, with no breaks, but the weather — while extremely hot, especially for those rowing under cloudless skies on reflective water — did allow the races to proceed pretty smoothly, so much so that things were actually ahead of schedule by mid-afternoon.
Nevertheless, Regatta Committee president Chris Neary, agreed Wednesday ‘s Regatta was a “maxed-out “event, and while lauding the conduct and contributions of the rowers, boathouse workers, volunteers and committee members, he made it clear that they were very, very fortunate in having been able to make it a single-day exercise.
With what was a one-off, once-on-a-lifetime Regatta over, nobody is expecting the same volume of crews in 2019. And it remains to be seen if the champions will among the drop-outs.
Will m5, or some version of the champion team, its members having done all they set out to do three years ago, be able find a reason to choose a return over at least a rest?
Will Outer Cove, having already established a Hall of Fame-worthy career, feel compelled to continue chasing the record, or as James Cadigan put it, to continue “chasing history?”
If so, they might hope for a little more help from those celestial creatures in charge of climate controls.
Not that conditions were poor Wednesday, far, far from it, but they could have been a better.
As if to prove that point, about a half hour after the conclusion of the men’s championship race, just when the Outer Cove men were straining to raise the new 87-pound Molson Coors Gerry Angel Memorial championship trophy, as the sun began its drop behind the Boulevard side of the lake, the winds subsided and Quidi Vidi began to take on a glassy look for which rowers pray.
And there came that Lovin Sponful song again, and the line from the last stanza:
“And babe, don’t you know it’s a pity that the days can’t be like the nights.”
Twitter:telybrendan
