The superheated sidewalk dancing days of a west coast summer have largely not lived up to the promise offered up by Environment Canada in late Spring ... but there have been moments of brilliant clarity. Our annual dragon boat festival was one of those weekends that stretch out forever and just as in your childhood, leave the kiss of watermelon and splash of golden sun in your memories.
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Surrounded by thousands of paddlers and spectators, this dog's only concern was a log sized stick and whether
his owner would throw it again. And again. And again ... |
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The Nanaimo festival is also well known for one other thing that sets it apart from other festivals .. a theme, with this year's being Caribbean. Teams are encouraged to get behind the theme, decorate their tent, dress up and enjoy the fun. This particular Victoria team has obviously been planning for a long time .. the entire team dressed and paddled in these outfits on Saturday. They're used to dropping jaws ... last year, they all showed up as Vegas showgirls. This is one of the teams we raced in the final.
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| It's all about the drum. Oh, and style. |
The KVL team this year has not been consistent with the numbers of people who show up, mostly due to the fact that the paddlers all work at a health care facility - Kiwanis Village Lodge - and are on different shifts. My steersperson, the team captain, would often disappear for a week as he fulfilled his obligations at work. I remember one exceptionally calm night with barely a ripple on the water, I took a crew of only seven people out for their workout. My coaching intentions were constantly changing due to the number of people in a boat. I'd plan for vigorous training drills and race peices, only to find a minimum number of paddlers .. and my carefully laid out plans would go out the window. Or I'd find practice called off at the dock because of too much wind.
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Early Sunday morning, the promise of a bright day is playing peekaboo with the cloud cover.
This gives you an idea of what the docks look like during a well organized heat changeover.
The Namaimo festival enjoys a reputation all along the coast as one of the better organized and laid out sites. |
So it wasn't with a great deal of hope that I went into this year's Nanaimo Dragon Boat Festival. I was realistic with the team when I laid out expectations, noting that I was looking for personal bests, that we'd treat this like a practice. We'd all concentrate on the things we had to work out and we went over them carefully .. as a collective team, as a row, as a 'pod,' and as an individual paddler, drummer or steersperson.
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| On the way out to Saturday's first race with Kelly at the helm. |
The pictures I have here are mostly from the first race of the weekend, where I was watching from shore. We were not a seeded team and came in third in that race, I think. On the first day, teams are seeded, meaning that many teams such as our rec team come up against the more competitive teams .. it often makes for wins by large margins. We look at factors such as our race times vs past known times to gauge how well we're doing. And of course, we watch the times of all the other teams. We did pretty much as expected on the first race, then we settled in for the afternoon race where we placed third, but shaved a whopping 12 seconds off our time from the morning .. a really unexpected and encouraging sign.
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| Crossing the finish line in good form! |
Collective times from the first day are used to place teams into race divisions for Sunday, where the races are much more tightly contested. There are no runaway wins .. all the races are hard fought alongside the other boats. This is what racing is really all about. When there is a team alongside your boat and hungry for a win, it gives you the push to come up with surprising results. It was with some startlement that we found ourselves placed into the Gold Division, despite our placements on Saturday .. and not only that .. but seeded as the highest placing team within that category.
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| Rock on girls! |
Our first race, we placed second, good enough to get us into the medal round for the afternoon. The team was plenty excited at this point, since many of them had not raced for medals before. Nerves were well quashed with a bit of shopping at the site and the now team tradition of poutine before a big race.
(Last year, I couldn't find part of the team as we were called to marshall for racing, only to find that they'd leisurely strolled away to get poutine and sit to take in the sights, sounds and racing. So on the way to the start line, they were still gobbling down last bites of poutine and dealing with the adrenalin of watching their coach explode, but not before turning blue in the face, then red, then purple. They saved grace by winning and now its a funny page in their history books. And a must do before a big race.) It worked really well because not only did they shave 11 seconds off their morning race time, but won by so large a margin you'd have thought we were a Saturday seeded team. There was much dancing and purchasing of drink tickets in the beer garden .. when I left many of them were slightly weaving and parading their first gold medals. So once again .. they showed me how much heart they had and where it could take them. Well done, ladies. I'm sooo pleased.
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| Sunday morning site |
