A blustery easterly wind was the forecast of the day, marquees needed holding down with lots of ropes and an abundance of cake!
The lifeboat open day had returned to Buckie after several years of absence on a smaller scale than before with the hope of building it back up in future years. The event this year included a small number of stalls and food outlets and the St Ayles skiffs rowing in the basin in Buckie harbour providing close racing for spectators to watch.
The races took the form of a pursuit style event around 4 red buoys in the corner with 2 start/finish buoys (yellow)  in the middle of the leg for each boat to start on.

The races were short and there was time for novice crews to practice before heading to the line. 6 Categories were raced for during the day with a 7 being a blue light event. This entailed the police, fire brigade, coastguard, lifeboat, and ambulance services battling it out to get there first. The ambulance crew of 4 novices even went to the effort of fancy dress – Or at least we hope they don’t usually look like that! The fire brigade and police both had 2 novice rowers, the coastguards had 1 novice rower and the lifeboat crew had 3 novice rowers. The final was won by just 0.69 of a second by the lifeboat crew who narrowly piped the coastguard.In the open category the men’s race was won by the lifeboat crew rowing in Boatie. Lossimouth won the women’s, and the mixed was won by Uisege. In the 40s category the lifeboat crew won the men’s race, Lossiemouth won the women’s and Banac won the mixed.Buckie lifeboat would like to thank all crews for supporting the event and hope to have it running again in future.
The full results are shown below.