FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2011 - Last night's Marshall University homecoming parade in Huntington drew thousands of spectators to the city for the annual event.  Herd Racing's float, I mean boat, drew a crowd as well.  The Chespeake Elementary School E Team football guys, coached by Herd Racing Crew Chief Jeramey Wentz, walked with the boat and the Huntington Hammer professional football team mascot rode along the parade route with the Herd Racing entry.  Throw in a few Marshall cheerleaders, Marco, the university's mascot and a few thousand spectators and it made for a great evening.

The events continue off the water for Herd Racing's boats next weekend, October 22, as the team participates in a daylong gospel sing in Huntington.  The Herd Racing Jesus boat will be on hand and team members will be answering questions about the team, our outreach goals and giving out literature, Plans of Salvation and inspirational DVDs.

Then two boats and the team mascots will take part in a fundraiser for a local church's food pantry on Saturday, November 5 near the Huntington Mall in nearby Barboursville.  That event also will have plenty of food, music and the team's display booth set up to promote our upcoming 5K race which is scheduled for later in November.  Hopefully we can help generate some food donations for the church's pantry to help their clients through the long hard winter that confronts us.

But, its not been all fun and games this week.  We received two reconditioned Performance Propellers for our SST-60 program this week.  That will give us four up to date propellers to test on the SST-60 boats come spring.  The past two years we have ran pretty much every race on the same propeller and only began propeller experimentations toward the end of the year when we got a second good propeller.  Hopefully, we will tackle the 2012 season opener with solid test time under our belts in both SST-60 and SST-120 as we hope to have four good props for each boat before the weather turns warm in 2012.  Starting the season with testing under our belt is key.  We can't afford to use the races as test time in 2012 as we will be working very hard to improve our race performance over what we view as a disappointing effort on the water in 2011.

Keep checking back.  We'll have some more news in the coming days.  We are working on a couple sponsorship proposals for next year, have to pick up our SST-60 rebuilt Hemp boat from Gary Pugh and have another boat that will be delivered to the shop later this month as a backup to our SST-120 boat.  Lots to do and the off season will fly by I am sure.  New 2012 calendar in the works, new 2012 hero cards in the works.  Lot's to share with you over the next several weeks.

Dana Tomes