Forty four paddlers turned up on a beautiful summer evening for another great Brown’s Race, including World No. 4 DR Paddler, Gerhard Schmid, of Austria.
Lured from a snowy Austrian winter by the promise of sunshine, wilderness and white water, somehow Gerhard ended up at Brown’s for the world’s shortest half-marathon, single-sport, urban-wilderness, x-stream flatwater, xpd adventure race. Gerhard obviously was intimidated by the challenging venue as much as by the competition – he was seen shaking his head and muttering "I can’t even beat Dan Firth in a beer drinking competition so how can expect to I beat the others in canoeing?" and despite intense training with Andrew Maynard the night before, he only managed 3rd behind Matt Dalziel and Ben Maynard.
In the women’s, Imogen Pearce won easily from Deana Kingdom with Sharon Campbell in 3rd and Nel Pittman 4th in only her first race at Browns.
In the Premier Creek Class, Rosie Mollison used all her guile and years of experience to defeat a fast finishing Faye Johnstone, whilt Andrew Koolhof and Ed Dodderidge had an easy win in the C2 class.
In the Junior DR Class, Andrew Eckhardt and Daniel Watkins duelled it out with Andrew winning by only 6 seconds, whilst in the Junior Slalom Class Brad Rogers beat Clancy Bowman by an incredible 9 hundreds of a second.
The next Browns Race is set to be a real corker.
