Here’s your weekly opportunity to enjoy tales from others who also love rowing.  This weekly round-up is for a short list of interesting, in-depth articles for you to read over the weekend.

And of course, if you have news that you think other readers would enjoy – send it to us via our contact page. Each day we tweet and retweet short rowing news links that our followers are sharing – to get these follow @rowperfect on Twitter.

This week in the rowing online news several stories caught our eye:

• GB Coxswain Rowley Douglas is giving a talk about his Sydney and London Olympic experience [he’s trialling for the GB 8 coxswain seat] from January 24th, 7.30 pm at Chiswick Pier, London W4 and also doing fund raising for the NSPCC charity, aiming to raise £20,000 by trying every Olympic sport before end of 2012.
• Melodie, a novice coxswain in USA, writing about an awesome morning outing when she and the stroke were ‘at one’ and had a good thing going.
• Carl Douglas has created his first video “how to measure your boat for AeroWing riggers”.  Clear, instructional and without sound it sets out the correct boat terminology for the rigger (fore, main and top stays) – which I didn’t know.
• British Rowing runs marketing workshops for clubs to learn how to attract new members
• The art of ocean rowing – some helpful tips – take shin guards and learn to surf!
• Oxford rowing culture gets a work-out in a murder mystery book by Deborah Crombie about local cop, Becca Meredith.  though why you’d choose to train in Oxford for the Olympics is beyond me….

She raises the question “how far is too far?” How focused is too focused? Where does it turn to obsession? Many of the characters have obsessions of one kind or another. She adds to the scenario by folding in the story of a serial rapist, which also, of course, is about power and control.