SIR — I am sorry Brenda Boulton felt compelled to write to you to express her disappointment over this year's RNLI Blue Anchor to Minehead raft race, her enjoyment of which, apparently, was marred by the low state of the tide.

I can assure her that the organisers deliberate long and hard every year over the timing of the event, which is usually scheduled over a bank holiday weekend in order to attract the maximum attendance and fundraising support.

This exercise naturally includes lengthy and detailed study of tide times which are so crucial to the event's running – and I can assure Mrs Boulton that as professional (if voluntary) seafarers, the crew are entirely conversant with the local tidal patterns.

However, this year the bank holiday weekend tides were such that running an afternoon race would have been impossible without fitting all the rafts with wheels, which would have presented a considerable, additional engineering challenge to those their builders already face.

The decision was therefore taken to move the event to the weekend nearest the bank holiday. That weekend was served by lower, neap tides (when the sea is in during the afternoon) rather than higher, spring tides (when the sea is in during the early morning and evening) – and particularly low neap tides at that.

This necessitated the course being changed to omit the usual dog-leg which takes competitors to the landward side of Metropole Post, because there was a real danger of some of the stragglers running out of water, and the rafts instead following a direct line from Warren Point to the harbour.

I fully accept Mrs Boulton's point that this detracted slightly from the spectacle but I hope she now understands the difficulty Minehead lifeboat crew has in reconciling the various challenges posed by date, time and tide.

Ultimately, of course, tidal conditions are entirely at the whim of the gravitational pull of the moon - over which even the RNLI has no control.

Chris Rundle,

Local Press Officer,

RNLI Minehead.