Dragon boating

On four Friday nights in May and early June, Angharad and I completed an Intro to Dragon Boating course! It was a lot of fun - and hard work! We had purchased a Groupon for it a couple months earlier, and booked in for the first course of the season.

For those of you who haven't heard of dragon boating before, click here to read about it on Wikipedia. It's a team paddling sport with the paddlers seated in pairs along a traditional long boat. The boats we were in held 20-24 paddlers, but some dragon boats can hold up to 100 paddlers! Dragon boating is a racing sport, but the beauty and aim of it is for all the paddlers to be paddling in perfect unison. To facilitate this, there is usually a drummer in the front of the boat, setting the pace... but for our course, this was generally achieved by the instructors screaming "One! Two! Three! Four!" at us!

The first session, May 6th, saw about 100 Groupon paddlers turn up at the Creekside Community Recreation Centre, which meant we were divided between five boats. It was a cold and rainy evening... and as beginner paddlers do quite a bit of splashing, we were pretty chilled by the end of it! However, we learnt a lot, gave numerous muscles a workout, and enjoyed the beautiful setting: False Creek, between the Cambie St Bridge and Science World, with a backdrop of Vancouver's skyline and our beautiful snowcapped mountains to the north.

The second session, May 13th, was a lovely sunny day. After this session, my shoulder and back muscles were sore, which was a good sign that my technique was improving: you are meant to paddle by tilting and/or twisting your torso, rather than just by pulling with your arm muscles. This week two teams of paddlers were separated from the rest of us and given much more intensive training, as they had elected to participate in the upcoming Rio Tinto Alcan Dragonboat Festival (North America's biggest and best dragon boat festival, held in Vancouver - this weekend, in fact!).

The third session, May 27th (the previous Friday was skipped due to it being a long weekend), Angharad wasn't able to come, so Ben stepped in at the last minute. One instructor had previously told us about a seal that is often seen in the area - and this day we saw him/her, floating belly-up near our boat for half a minute! Here are a few photos taken on my phone afterwards... another overcast day.

The fourth and final session, June 3rd, was a beautiful clear day, and Ben came along to take photos of us from the water's edge. By this week, only three boats' worth of paddlers showed up, compared to the original five! There also happened to be a mini expo for Bike to Work Week going on beside the Rec Centre, so Ben got a few photos of that too... as well as picking up a few free samples from Lush for me!

Dragon boaters warming up...

Getting into the boats...

And we're off!

Police chase!


Some of the others sharing the water with us...

Racing the other boats (our boat won - even though our opponents were the two festival teams!)...

Afterwards, Angharad, Ben and I walked to Mario's Gelati to celebrate the end of our course with some gelato. Learning to dragon boat was fun... but I am looking forward to having a few less-energetic Friday nights now!