Rowing for The Armidale School, coxswain Henry Hughes, elder brother Saxon (in the bow seat) and their teammates powered home over 2000m in 6:55.72 – achieving their primary goal of the first sub-seven minute time recorded by a TAS crew at the regatta.

The crew spent most of the race neck and neck with St Joseph’s College and St Ignatius College Riverview, with less than a second ultimately separating the three crews.

TAS was second at the 500m mark behind ultimate winner Shore, then narrowly dipped to fourth at the 1500m before crossing the line in a photo finish with Riverview for third.

“By the one thousand metre mark I realised how fast we were going and that we were keeping our momentum, and that’s when it occurred what we were capable of,” Saxon said.

“The massive crowd just carries you for the last 250m – it is an amazing atmosphere.”

Henry, who has coxed at three Head of the River regattas previously, worked with the crew on their race plan.

“Usually it takes a little while at the start of the season for a crew to row together well, but this crew clicked straight away,” Henry said.

“We had a fast stroke rate for the first five hundred meters to get us into the top three boats, and once we were in second place we lengthened out and slowed our rate but kept the power in the boat.

“The hardest bit was the third five hundred metres, we really started slamming down our legs and driving through the pain and then with two hundred and fifty metres to go, lifted our rate again at put as much power into our stroke as we could, to steal the podium from Riverview.”

Also in the boat were Sebastian Scott (Armidale), Will Cannington (Narrabri) and Michael Baldock (Clybucca).

TAS fielded three Fours in this year’s event, staged at the the Sydney International Regatta Centre.

The centre was built especially for the 2000 Olympics on land that used to be a quarry before being reborn into a state-of-the-art facility.