Just wondering if you have any advice for setting up a J16 junior girls 8+ rigging and oar length? I would say 4 of them are lightweight size and 4 heavyweight? Thanks

Thanks for your question – we have a quick answer and a longer one.

The quick answer is to copy what a known expert (Valery Kleshnev) recommends – here’s a link to his rigging chart which allows you to input their details and then spits out a traditional and an innovative recommended rig.   [Update June 2018 this chart is no longer online].

I guessed they were about 1 meter 65 tall and 65 kg  and could do an erg 2k in 8 mins 30 secs…. you can correct this based on real data.

This recommendation is based on their rating doing 2k in the boat – you will know if the girls can rate 37.4 on a traditional rig or if they are capable of rating 38.4.

J16 girls eight rigging rowing shell[/caption]

Learn more about rowing rigging

The longer answer is to do deeper research and to learn what different types of rigging CAN do for a crew.

Here’s a short reading list for you

1. FISA rigging course Intermediate chapter – it does not make recommendations for juniors 
2. A shorter article on rowing rigging written by Nigel Weare and Gordon Burton a while ago but a good introduction 
3. Mike Davenport is the acknowledged US expert on rigging and his website MaxRigging.  Sadly the numbers aren’t detailed(or the table is broken) so I can recommend his books

– The Nuts and Bolts Guide to Rigging 

– Absolutely Maximise your Rowing Numbers

Both for sale in the Rowperfect shop.  See all products and articles on rigging

4.  Lastly as a general education, there was a rigging survey of all the boats in the 2006 World Rowing championships held in UK written up by Rosie Mayglothling and her team.  [download the findings].

The output is a gigantic spreadsheet of each boat that raced and the precise measurements of their rig and a second one for oar lengths.

Now I know these are the top internationals and not directly comparable to your J16 girls, but it’s instructive that they pretty much use standard rigs for the womens 8s.  Some had bigger oar spoon sizes and so had shorter oar lengths, most had spans within 1.5 cm of each other.  [Note the USA oar lengths has a typo they would not have been 274.5 cm that should be 374.5 cm, I think.]

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