There’s nothing like sweeping the competition to shake off first-race jitters.

The Harvard lightweight crew won every race against Georgetown yesterday and captured the varsity and second varsity events over Cornell and Penn on Saturday. The Crimson was unsure of what to expect coming into its first competition of the season, especially given the short amount of time its boats had practiced on the water due to ice.

“Across the board, our main focus was for all the boats to just grind away—[there was] no set race plan,” captain Nick Blannin said.

Harvard now has a better idea of how it compares against national competition. The Hoyas defeated Princeton on Saturday and fell to defending national champion Yale last weekend by only two seconds.

The Crimson’s next challenge is on its home waters this Saturday when it races Dartmouth and MIT for the Biglin Bowl on the Charles River.

“We’re going to have to bring the rating up through the year and we can work on having a little more control,” Blannin said. “It was really tough in the rough water and it was the first race of the season. There are always a couple kinks to work out.”

Sunday

Harvard fended off a Hoya push to beat Georgetown handily by almost five seconds on Mercer Lake, N.J., where the rowers also battled mid-30s temperatures and a strong crosstail wind that created whitecaps in the middle of the course.

The Crimson took a four-seat lead from the start, but the Hoyas took a seat back 700 meters into the race. One seat was not enough, however, as Harvard extended its advantage thoughout the rest of the course, finishing with open water between the boats.

In the second varsity event, the Harvard ‘A’ boat triumphed by nine seconds, while the ‘B’ boat fell behind Georgetown by over 25.

In the freshman events, both novice boats beat their Hoya counterparts, bouncing back from losses the previous day. In particular, the first freshman boat’s win was impressive in light of an interesting race.

“They showed a lot of character in the race against Georgetown,” Blannin said.

Despite being down two-thirds of a boat 500 meters into the race, the Crimson added a little power to pull by Georgetown in the final legs of the course.

“Down the course, we had a lot of fun trying to row into waves that were rolling because of the wind,” said freshman coxswain Felix Yu. “Georgetown was up coming into the 750-meter mark, but they were starting to fade and we took a power 10 to start walking through them with 750 [meters] left.”

Harvard’s success in the freshman boats came after a tough first outing on Saturday, when the first boat finished last of three and Cornell edged out the second boat.