RegattaCentral

Here are some important notes. Please read this information carefully:

• A tentative event schedule has been posted on RegattaCentral.com. This is not final, but very close. We do anticipate a few scratches and minor changes, so please wait until Friday night for the final official schedule.
• Gas grills are permitted in the park. Please do not place a grill within 15 feet of any tree or branch, and please have a fire extinguisher nearby. Generators are also permitted, but we request that only the "quiet" style be used. Pets on leashes at all times are also permitted.
• The park is closed from 9pm to 6:30am. If you cannot arrive within these hours, please contact 804-677-8099 to coordinate your trailer parking. Parking at the venue is strictly limited only to trailers and food trailers. Please let parents, bus drivers, and other guests know that they must park at James River High School and walk down the paved path to the park.  (Buses may drop off the team, but must return to the school to park)
• We will again be using Remind.com for text alerts to announce each event. Simply send the text message @h3e2b3 to phone number 81010 and press send to join the notification text string. It’s often difficult to hear the announcer, so Remind.com will serve as another means to communicate with you and your coaches, rowers, and parent visitors. Please share this message and number with everyone associated with your team.
• Our schedule grants each boat 90 seconds to launch or recover once at the dock. Time is of the essence to stay on our schedule. Please have three extra people come down with the boats to help with oars and make launching as fast as possible.  This is also expected for recovery of your boats. Hot seating is strongly discouraged. Please discuss this with your team. We do not want to assess penalties for excess time on the dock.
• Except for rowers in the current event and up to 3 helpers, only the Head Coach should ever be on the dock with the boats.
• Please have all of the heel ties checked before coming down to launch and check all the equipment so as to facilitate a smooth launch process.
• When wet, the dock ramp can be VERY slippery. Especially when carrying a boat overhead. Coxswains should approach very gently and remind your boat mates about this in advance.
• The course is going to be up river to the start and then a race down river to the finish.  All boats should come to the docks stern first so that their bow will be facing up river for the launch.  They will need to move across the river carefully to avoid any boats coming down the course so that they will travel up to the start on the north bank.  There will be a buoyed channel for them to travel in.  Please tell coxswains to stop rowing if there is a boat coming down river as we always do in regattas.  They will travel thru the Route 288 bridge and on up to the start line.  Make sure that they travel up to the “No Wake" buoy before turning around as we do have current that will bring them down to the start chute and we don’t want them to bunch up right before entering the chute.  Right now the current is minimal, but we know that a lot of teams do not normally row in a river, so this is an important item.  We do not expect any change in the water level between now and the regatta, so the current should remain slow.
• Once they are above the start, the start Marshall will be telling the teams when they may enter the shoot and then the start ref will tell them that they are on the course. 
• There will be buoys at the chute, the start, the 2 and 1 mile and the finish.  They MUST finish between the finish buoys or the refs may assess a penalty.
• If they are going to pass another boat, they must do so toward the middle of the river and in a safe manner.  In other words, the passing boat will be on the port side of the boat that they are over taking.  The boat being passed MUST yield to the passing boat.  The head ref has already told us that they will assess a penalty for unsafe passing and she will explain that at the coaches meeting.
• Once the boat has gone thru the finish buoys, they will row down past the dock and then turn and recover up river.  This will allow us to be continuously launching boats as we are recovering. This will make everything move very smoothly. Please discuss this with your team.
• A concession tent with coffee, doughnuts, fruit, Chic-fil-A sandwiches, hotdogs, water, and Gatorade, plus other chips and snacks will be open from 7:45am until the end of the regatta.
• A merchandise tent will be open, and the very popular annual "Head of the James" t-shirt typically sells out by mid-morning. Encourage anyone interested in the event t-shirts bring cash and visit the tent early.
• Sponsor:  Boathouse Sports regional rep, JJ Cuyler, will have a merchandise tent all day.
• Sponsor:  Wintech/King Racing rep Matt Muffleman will be on hand all day.

All of this material will be covered in the coaches/coxswains meeting, but we wanted to send it out to you in advance so that your teams could be informed in advance of race day.