Monday, 18 June 2007 | Written by Rob Mousley A recent press release by Gameplan Media came close to saying that Lewis Laughlin cheated at Molokai by riding the wakes of the escort vessels that accompanied the paddlers across the Kaiwi Channel. We spoke to some of the competitors who took part in the race to find out what they thought. The Race We covered the race live by talking to some of the escort boats - none of them mentioned the issue at the time and we reported that Lewis was fairly close to the front bunch for most of the first half of the race.  Subsequently the group of Dawid, Lewis and Hank McGregor broke away and were "somewhere out in front". Paddling near Lewis during the first half of the race were Clint Pretorius and Oscar Chalupsky. Clint Pretorius Clint said he didn't see anything untoward in Lewis' paddling.  In any case, "everyone gets a wash," he said, "it's up to the escort boats to get out of the way." "And at the end," he added, "Lewis took a better line.  That's a fact." Oscar Chalupsky Oscar said that at times the groups behind the leading paddlers were riding wakes.  "Of course there were patches of waves," he said, "and we knew that that would make it easier for the guys paddling behind." "At one stage I dropped back to tell my escort boat to move further away because they were setting up a wave for the