THE HEAD OF THE CHARLES REGATTA

The Head of the Charles Regatta is three days of rowing on the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge, from a Friday to a Sunday in October: crews of every age set off one after another, about fifteen seconds apart, and race the clock and one another upstream for 4,702 metres, some three miles, under seven bridges to the finish at Herter Park. More than eleven thousand athletes come, in more than seventy events. It calls itself the world’s largest three-day rowing event.

At the first bridge a plane can fly over a car driving over a train passing over a rower. The regatta counts it one of three such bridges known in the world.

The Head of the River

Ernest Arlett, the sculling instructor at Harvard, came from England, where only gentlemen could race. When he brought a Northeastern crew to Henley, “the team entered by the front door and Mr. Arlett still had to enter by the rear or servants door.”

It was Arlett who proposed a “head of the river” race on the Charles, in the tradition of the races of his native England. Three members of the Cambridge Boat Club, D’Arcy MacMahon, Howard McIntyre and Jack Vincent, took his advice, and held the first on 16 October 1965. They thought an autumn regatta would break the monotony of the training season; it was the wrong time of year, and no one expected spectators. The winner of each event takes the title Head of the Charles. The name is still the Cambridge Boat Club’s registered trademark.

The regatta grew to two days in 1997 and to three in 2021. It has been cancelled only twice: in 1996, for a storm, and in 2020, when it was held online instead.

The first-place medal is of struck bronze, two and a half inches across, with a single sculler seen from above, and is given on the Saturday and Sunday evenings.

Against the Clock

A head race is a procession. The boats start in the order of the year before, the winners first, and are timed from the line; a faster crew catches the one ahead and must be let by, and a crew that fails to yield is penalised. Passing almost always happens.

The course starts at Boston University’s DeWolfe Boathouse and runs upstream under the BU Bridge, with the Grand Junction railroad bridge beneath it, then the River Street and Western Avenue bridges, to the Weeks Footbridge, where the river turns sharply, ninety degrees, and the crowd is thickest. Past Harvard’s Weld Boathouse it goes under the Anderson Bridge, and under the Eliot Bridge, the seventh and last, beside the Cambridge Boat Club, to finish at Herter Park. The Championship Fours and Eights, the events that count most, are rowed last on the programme, and the championship sculling on the Saturday afternoon.

Two thousand four hundred volunteers run it. The Directors’ Lounge, a two-tiered tent at the Cambridge Boat Club, is the regatta’s own hospitality; the Eliot Bridge Enclosure, upstream of the bridge, is a ticketed tent open from eight until five on the Saturday and Sunday and for lunch on the Friday.

In 2026 the regatta runs from Friday 16 to Sunday 18 October, on a provisional schedule. The course records stand to be raced against: Brown University’s 14:13.412 in the Club Eights of 2023, and St. Paul’s School’s 14:12.127 in the Youth Eights of 2017.

What to Know

It runs from a Friday to a Sunday in the second half of October. The 2027 dates have not been announced.

In 2026 a day in the Directors’ Lounge cost $495, on the Saturday or the Sunday, with breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and a bar. The Eliot Bridge Enclosure cost $300 a day, or $135 for a child of four to twelve, and the Friday lunch there $75.

Nothing is published. Country clothes and a coat: it is a riverbank in late October, and the Court dresses for one.

Three stations of the T are within a walk of the course: Central and Harvard on the Red Line, and BU Central on the Green. Hotels are booked through the regatta’s agent, HBC Event Services, which asks that the hotels not be called directly. The Hyatt Regency stands by the start.

The mistake is to drive. Memorial Drive is closed from eight in the morning until seven in the evening on the Saturday and Sunday, from the Cambridge Boat Club to Western Avenue; parking is scarce, and the regatta strongly advises anyone without a boat on the car to come by public transport.

The Court

The Head of the Charles Regatta is not the Court’s own. Places in the Directors’ Lounge, at the Cambridge Boat Club by the last bridge, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Boston or Cambridge, and the table afterward.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.