WELCOME to Grapevine, the page where your news and views are solicited. Here you can share your favourite gripes and tit-bits of information with other rowers. Just click on the page header and send us an e-mail. They won't all be dealt with on grapevine, but where room permits and the subject matter is pertinent we will share the content. Todd Carpenter from Tauranga has been telling us for a month or two now that he's in contact with an Aussie bloke who in his youth rowed the 100 metres in 13.6 seconds and the 500 metres in 1 minute 10 seconds. If this is true we suspect that those rows may be the fastest of all time. Todd says that even now, in his forties, the Aussie bloke can still row the 500 in 1 minute 14 seconds. We think that the Ocker in question needs to enter the World Sprintrow championships next October and make his current times official. Organising and administering indoor rowing competitions throughout New Zealand, we tend to be the receptacles of a lot of feedback - both good and bad. Concept 2's new race system "Venue Row" seems to have attracted mainly adverse comment. Most contest organisers are upset with it because of the consistent failures and breakdowns that have been occurring with it in the middle of races. Competitors don't like it because of the ridiculously long wait between 'Start' and the commencement of the countdown proper. Although the system has obviously been engineered to eliminate the 'anticipated start' by alternating inconsistent time lapses between the starting commands and even from one start to another, it makes no difference whatsoever to the number of false starts recorded. This planned inconsistency, along with the three-command start, is probably the single most hated aspect of the system from the competitors' viewpoint. We think that Concept 2 should look at the six-command even start of e-row married to the user-friendly set up facility of venue row; provided that the system is technically purified first of course. Greg Stothers, the popular outdoor coach from Petone, reports that the handle material of the new Concept 2 model D tends to wear badly or tear up from athletes wearing rings when rowing. We don't doubt for a moment that Greg is absolutely right, but ring wearers, you shouldn't be wearing them when rowing as the exercise causes fingers and joints to swell which can then cause circulatory problems. Speaking of the model D: ain't it just the smoothest thing you've ever rowed? We notice a much better consistency in feel and performance from model D to model D as compared with model C to model C. We also think it's faster than the model C ... 46 new records at the Nationals and a whole bunch more at Kerikeri. John Rippon, the computer whiz who established this web site for us, on reading the 'how to' for beginners, asked why be so adamant about not more than 10° back lean at the completion of stroke. He observes that most people lean back much further than that and that most instructional illustrations (including ours) also illustrate an angle greater than 10° as well. The matter with the latter is that none of us can draw. Seriously though, there are a number of reasons for the 5-10°. The most important for racing is that the recovery needs to happen quickly after the completion of stroke with the hands, arms and shoulders getting out first, pivoting from the hips. This is very difficult to do quickly or efficiently if you're leaning back further than 10°.