Their under-19 ladies crew will continue their preparations for next weekend's state titles in Newcastle when they take on the highly fancied Woolgoolga on Saturday.

The Boatettes currently lead the way in the combined under-19 and under-23 division.

With clubs expected to field minimal crews in that division this weekend, sweep Steve Monaghan said they would step up and compete in the women's open division.

"There isn't not a lot of competition (in the under-19 and under-23 division) for the girls and numbers are down a bit this week so they'll lump all the girls together," he said.

"We'll be racing against the open women which will be a good test and I'm looking forward to it to see where we are at."

Huge seas forced last weekend's Battle of the Boats competition to be moved from Elizabeth Beach to the lake in front of the Pacific Palms Recreational Club.

The Boatettes chance of victory was then scuppered by a bad lane draw.

"It was pretty shallow," Monaghan said.

"I'm not whinging, but we got alley five in every race and that was the shallowest end. We were dragging along the bottom a little bit.

"Alleys one, two and three had an advantage but out of everything it was a good training session for the girls."

It forced them to change their focus from winning their races to fine tuning for the upcoming state titles.

"We knew we couldn't match them because of the lane we were in so we did race strategies and a bit of hard work; it was good," Monaghan said.

"We're treating this weekend as preparation for state and really knuckling down.

"We're trying to improve our starts, turns and sections of the race where we think we need some improvement."

They were looking forward to returning home for the second last round of the year although it would still require hard work setting up the carnival.

Monaghan hoped it wouldn't affect their race results.

"It's always good to have a home ground advantage," he said.

"You do have to work pretty hard to set up carnivals though so I'm hoping that doesn't wreck us too much; it's always good to have a carnival at home.

"Rainbow Beach usually has a wave and it's a bit tricky to negotiate if you don't train there all the time.

"If the swell is up it will sort out the good crews from the not so surf skilled crews."

Despite the step up in competition that beckoned, Monaghan still felt the girls were good enough to be up towards the top.

"If we can keep up with Woolgoolga who have a very strong open ladies crew, I'd be really happy," he said.

​First race is at 9.30am on Saturday at Rainbow Beach.

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