Disaster and near shipwreck befell one of the two veteran eights crews from Totnes in the Vesta veteran eights head race on the Thames. Despite a blustery wind and the promise of rain, conditions were quite benign over the four and a quarter mile Tideway course on which the Oxford/Cambridge University boat race would be racing exactly a week later. The vet E crew of John Harris, Hugh Tubbs, Gary Cairns, Colin Souch and Pete Atkinson at stroke teamed up with Lea RC, Tradesmen and ex-Totnes rower John Poland with an Exeter RC cox to put in an impressive first third of the course, pulling away from the Greenbank/Derby composite strongly.   Bradford on Avon were overtaken within the first four minutes and the crew then encountered BTC and Crabtree simultaneously. As they pulled through them, the Crabtree boat came round the outside of the Surrey bend and started coming across as the Totnes composite crew were three quarters of a length up on them. They collided and the Totnes boat suffered a bent fin and lost rudder, almost colliding with the bank. They had to stop briefly. As luck would have it the bent fin biased the steering the opposite way to the Surrey bend necessitating differential power between the two sides to affect navigation. So with most of the race to go and bow side rowers pulling lightly compared with stroke side, their finish time of 20 minutes, 42.52 seconds was truly amazing. Without the clash and damage they would have been well in contention for the vet E pennant and much further up the overall finish position than their eventual 63rd out of 173 and 9th out of 23 in category.   By contarst, the younger vet D Totnes composite had a good clean row but turned in a disappointing time of 21 minutes and 41.51 seconds, nearly a minute behind the older and handicapped vet E's. The crew boasted six different clubs from two countries with Simon Gifford-Mead, Alan Langmaid, Steve Lamkin and coxed by Steve Grimes joining rowers from Mumbles and Llandaff in Wales, Stourport, Molesley and Derek Rickard, the captain of Plymouth RC, making his second appearance in the Totnes crew within the past few weeks. The boat and blades came courtesy of Stourport but with the gearing of the blades set a little too high they were unable to get the stroke rate above 32 strokes/minute and the neat rowing just became a slog for most of the second half of the course. Despite overtaking one crew, they were themselves overtaken on the line at Putney. Final position was 112th overall and 22nd out of 35 in category.     Alan Langmaid, vice-chairman and PR, Dart-Totnes ARC.