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18th May 2016

Boat Club to launch two new boats

After a successful fundraising campaign Exeter College Boat Club will launch two new boats this coming weekend.

Thanks to the generosity of alumni, parents and friends of the College, plus the determined fundraising efforts of students, Exeter College Boat Club has been able to purchase two state-of-the-art new boats.

Made by Filippi, one of the leading manufacturers of boats in the world, the two new boats cost in the region of £26,000 each. They were paid for, in part, by a sponsored ergathon, as students rowed 220 km – equivalent to the distance from Exeter College, Oxford to Exeter city, Devon – on two rowing machines in the JCR.

The boats will be named at a ceremony on Sunday 22 May at 1pm which will be attended by Rector Sir Rick Trainor, the Chaplain, Reverend Andrew Allen, donors, students, and members of Exeter College Chapel Choir. Alumni and friends of the College are also most welcome to attend the event.

The boats will be named Sandra D, after the wife of Emeritus Fellow Professor Raymond Dwek, whose generosity helped purchase the new boats, and Andúril, after a sword from JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which was reforged to vanquish evil and herald a new age of men.

Sandra D and Andúril should be markedly faster than the Boat Club’s older boats, but they require experienced crews to harness their speed and will be raced by the men’s and women’s first crews. In recent years the Boat Club has struggled in Torpids and Summer Eights but in this year’s Torpids races the Club’s fortunes improved considerably. It is hoped that these new, cutting-edge boats will herald a new age for the Boat Club and that very soon the men’s and women’s crews will power back to division one and to the head of the river.

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