CBC Sweeps Founder’s Day Regatta

By Neirad Staff

This past Sunday, May 5th, the Connecticut Boat Club (CBC) attended the 60th annual Founder’s Day Regatta at Lake Waramaug State Park. 

CBC is an all girls crew team based in Norwalk that is not a Darien High School affiliated team but has many DHS students on its roster. This weekend the top 20 varsity athletes and 10 Novice athletes competed this weekend. Some of those athletes included DHS seniors Catherine Garrett and Vivi Van Ingen, juniors Julia Abbruzzese and Flynn Woodring, and sophomores Kaela Majamador and Isabelle Garrett. 

CBC lined up six boats across with a floating start against some of the top prep schools in the area including Kent, Greenwich Academy, Choate, and Deerfield. 

Founder’s Day is a 4+ only event; CBC raced fours from the 1V to 5V category and two fours in the Novice category. 

Heats were in the morning and the varsity boats raced down the 1500 meter course in the hopes of placing in the top three in order to move on to the grand finale in the afternoon. CBC went 5-5 in first place finishes in the morning races by extreme margins (some races were won by multiple boat lengths of open water!). 

Then came the Novice races after lunch. The CBC A boat won by almost a full minute (pretty much unheard of) and the B boat also won its final by a generous margin, moving the team into 7 for 7 on the day’s races.

Following the novices came the finals for the rest of the varsity team where every boat won its grand final making the club’s record 12-12. 

This was the first time ever CBC has won every single race they were entered in both heats and finals. 

This amazing performance also won the team the overall points trophy in the girls category. Junior Flynn Woodring said “It was a great day full of a lot of team support and excitement from seeing every boat do so well. The trophy and medal ceremony where we were able to hear our names called for each Gold medal and then our whole team called for the points trophy was really special”. 

Next week CBC will travel to both Lake Waramaug again for the Kent Invitational and Lowell in Massachusetts, and in two weeks they will have their Regional Championships in Lowell as well!