Another excellent days racing from Execalibre. The day didn't start too well with one of the cars coming from Exeter breaking down halfway! Luckily Glen came to the rescue to help 2 of the 4 people in the car to the racecourse. Shortage of numbers meant that the start of the day was confused and stressful, as Execalibre tried to recruit some extra numbers. In the end we decided to incorporate Bristol into our boat as they too were short on numbers. This turned out to be a masterstroke. The first race was against Secklow 100 over a 200m course. Despite the rushed nature of the partnership, Execalibre managed to defeat second placed Secklow by half a second, although not a fast enough time however to qualify for the 200m finals. So it was a nice break until the afternoon’s 400m competition. This break allowed the team to come up with a strategy and Execalibre benefited from this greatly. The first heat was against BA Hurricanes over a 400m course. A very tight race ensued, and only in the last 50m where some members of the Execalibre crew’s stamina failed them did BA manage to pull away with the victory. The time we produced however was so good that we managed to qualify for the cup competition for the first time in Execalibre history! Unfortunately being in the cup competition meant that we were racing the crème de la crème, and therefore in our next race we were unfortunate to only gain qualification into the Cup Tail Race. Still, we entered this race with our heads up, as we were running the fastest time of all the crews going into this race. The race started well – an explosive start took us away from the other crews by a head. When we settled into our race we look powerful and our strokes were long and strong. However near the end of the race we caught some bad wash which Sparky couldn’t deal with, and as we veered to the left we lost the lead we had gained. We ended up 2nd, narrowly being beaten again by Amathus Bees but comfortably beating Cardiff, a team who beat us at Exeter. Yet another positive result for the Execalibre crew, who despite only entering 2 league events have a good chance of producing a result at the National Cup in Nottingham. The league winners WAM Dragons (congratulations are in order) had a lower points average per event than Execalibre – just imagine if we could all make it to more events…

Full Race Results