Dragon Boat Festival

On Sunday afternoon, we stopped in at the 23rd annual Rio Tinto Alcan Dragon Boat Festival, held on and around False Creek in Vancouver. The 2-day festival is one of the oldest and biggest dragon boat festivals held outside of Asia, and is widely regarded as the best in North America. This year the festival attracted over 100 000 people, and almost 180 dragon boat teams.

Before heading down to the riverside to watch some of the championship races that had started at noon, we enjoyed some lunch from the onsite food carts while soaking up the sunshine and listening to the live entertainment...







The dragon boat teams race in various categories: Mixed Division, Women's Division, Junior Division, Senior Cup, Breast Cancer Survivor Challenge Race, First Timers Race, Visiting Teams Race, etc. Here are some of the teams in their eye-catching uniforms...






Down at the river, we found ourselves a vantage point and watched the teams competing in the next few races paddle their way to the buoys marking the starting line, 500m away...







We hung around long enough to see three races. There were up to eight boats in each race. It's no leisurely paddle, let me tell you... good teams can paddle the 500m in about 2 minutes! And with dragons' heads adorning the boats' prows, the drummers pounding out the rhythm, and the teams' paddles actually moving in unison, they looked rather more impressive than the boatloads of newbies at my recent dragon boating course! :)








Here's a compilation of a few video clips from the festival...

It was a fun, interesting and colourful event!