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A paddler I know peripherally watched me the other day while I was pumping an inch of rain water out of a 9 meter Champion docked at a local marina.

After a short time, she said, “I don’t know about you, but I’d never set foot in one of those Champions.”

Now, most folks know that I am the marketing dude for Nightstar Yacht Sales Ltd, the sole Canadian importer and distributor of Champion dragon boats, so I was a bit surprised to hear this.

I smiled politely and asked her why. Her response, given that she’d never been in a Champion, and had no plans to paddle in one any time soon, struck me as strange.

“They’re unsafe,” she said, “and tippy, too. Everybody knows that!” I asked how she, specifically, knew that, and she told me that, “one had rolled over right here in Nanaimo not long ago.”

I replied with what I thought was an obvious question, “So, if a dragon boat rolls over, that means it isn’t safe?” “That’s obvious,” she said, with a mildly patronizing smile, “nobody wants to be in a boat that rolls over.”

She was right about a Champ rolling over – I watched it happen in May of last year, right here in Newcastle Channel. She was wrong, however, in believing that (1) the event was unusual, or (2) that the incident was indicative of a flaw in the boat’s design.

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