Above: A member of Nanaimo, BC’s Aquaholics makes good use of his paddle during warm-up exercises at the Race the River festival.

Race the River (Prevailing Wins)

The Comox Prevailing Wins team also displays some cool warm-up techniques using their paddles and dynamic stretching.

This seems to me an idea whose time has definitely come, and it looks like a whole lot of fun!

Watching Prevailing Wins go through their routine left me wondering why the technique couldn’t be employed during parades and other demonstrations – in other words, dragon boat drill teams.

It’s nice to see paddlers walking in a parade, but think about how effective it would be if such drill teams existed! I can envision DB drill team trophies at major festivals, and such activity would be a GREAT way to promote the sport to the community as a whole.

How about some videos, paddlers? (Contact your local militia for tips on coordinating drills!)

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Western Canada and Pacific Northwest U.S.A.

If you know of festivals not listed here, please leave a comment and let me know.

Regarding Events In British Columbia: all payments made prior to April 1, 2013 are subject to HST at a rate of 12%. Payments made after April 1, 2013 are only subject to GST at a rate of 5%. This is in accordance with the Canada Revenue Agency rules surrounding the Elimination of the HST in British Columbia in 2013.

Our thanks to Nancy Bryson for providing this schedule.

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Andrea Smith is the quintessential Canadian girl. As I wrote on a web page devoted to her music, she was born and raised in the BC Interior, and began her formal music training at the ripe old age of five.

She grew between a 33 acre farm near the Shuswap Lakes and, fortunately for Vancouver Islanders, she eventually settled in Nanaimo, where she can often be found performing at local venues.

Andrea Smith Performs at the Nanaimo Dragon Boat Festival

If you were lucky, you caught her performance at this year’s Nanaimo Dragon Boat Festival.

Check out my web page here, and sample her music!

Andrea will be performing at the SoundGarden at the Coombs fairground tomorrow, October 6th. Check her out!

 

The Sproat Lake Challenge is the traditional season-ending festival on the Island, and provides a great venue that’ never fails to create a low-pressure, high laughter finale. In short, it’s FUN…and the setting is spectacular.

Silent Giant Waits Patiently for the Sound of Beating Drums

I’ve attended the West Coast Dragon Boat Society’s season-ending Sproat Lake event since 2006…with the exception of 2011 – last year drowned in rain (so you see what happens when I’m not there ).

The weather has always been spectacular, with two exceptions, the most notable of which, 2011, saw the event rained out. Yesterday, however, the weather was perfect – overcast in the early morning, clearing in late morning and then flooding the festival with sunshine for the lion’s part of the day.

I wasn’t able to catch a ride in the chase boat, so all of the photos were taken from shore, where the glare of the sun sometimes provided a challenge. My photographs from this year’s event have been uploaded to Facebook’s “BC Dragon Boat Paddlers” group – you’ll find them here.

If you can’t get to them on Facebook, send me $12 via PayPal and I’ll put them on a DVD for you and pop them in the mail – there’s a PayPal donation link on the right hand column of the blog.

As always, my focus is on people, rather than racing dragon boats. The reason for this is twofold. First, people are a LOT more interesting than dragon boats. Secondly, my 75-300mm zoom lens is simply not good enough to get decent racing photos, as you’ll see when you take a close look at the racing shots.

Here are a few of the photos that stand out in my mind…

Prevailing Wins Warming Up

This photo – for some bizarre reason – made me think about all the times dragon boat teams have participated in local parades…without their boats. Rather than walk down the middle of the road carrying their paddles, why not form a dragon boat drill team – using paddles instead of rifles? Exercises like this provide a different, and very dramatic, view of paddlers and what they do, and I think the public would love it. With a little help from the local militia drill sergeant and I can see the day when dragon boat teams compete as ferociously on the road as they do on the water. Matthew Dyck provided a fascinating peek at what’s possible in Facebook’s BC Dragon Boat Paddlers group.

I’d love to hear your comments and ideas!

Pedro Oliveira – SaveOn Dragon Slayers (Nanaimo)

An Awesome Smile

This photo provides a great example of the Bokeh effect generated by my 75-300mm zoom lens. Bokeh is “the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur,” according to Wikipedia, and it is one of the reasons I love focusing on people at public events…the lens is ideal for candid portrait work…What better way to showcase this incredble smile? Here are two more shots that illustrate Bokeh:

Sonja – Phoenix Rising

The SaveOn Dragon Slayers Edge Out Nanaimo’s Aquaholics in their first meeting.

Cheers,

Ken

 

Alas, even the eBay prices for used 500′s are beyond my reach at $6,000+ …now there’s another solution, equally expensive, but WOW! does it get the job done!

Check out these amazing shots from Montana’s Gravity Shots:

QuadraCopters offers a wide selection of Ready To Fly copters on their American website…and now I have more expensive toys to add to my wish list

 

Tom Arnold discusses technique during a Gorging Dragons stroke improvement clinic.

How many different types of dragon boats have you paddled in?

If you live on Vancouver Island, until recently, the most likely answer was one or two (Millenniums, and perhaps older 6-16 models). In the last year, however, paddling on the Island has undergone some pretty significant changes. Several clubs have purchased International class racing hulls that were previously rarely seen on the Island, and now the Victoria Festival too has adopted a new kind of boat (the D2) for its annual competition. All the changes have prompted a lot of questions: from paddlers and sterns wondering how to adjust to new craft; from coaches trying to figure out how to seat boats; and from clubs considering options for their future equipment purchases. In a future post, I’ll try to address some of the specific differences between the primary types of dragon boats that West Coast paddlers are likely to encounter, but today I’d like to start by trying to answer some of the most common questions that people have been asking me and other members of the Gorging Dragons over the past year.

Click here to read the entire article – and ask questions.Your comments are also welcome here, and can be shared on FaceBook.

 

Nanaimo’s Nautical Dragons poised for a practice start on their way to the starting buoy.

The Comox festival is a small event (more on that later), but that does not detract from its appeal. The venue is spectacular, although it sometimes seemed to me that the walk from the athletes’ village to the public docks (which offered the best view of the action) covered about 10 miles…it’s only a few hundred meters as the crow flies, but the walk seemed like it would never end. Kudos to the city for the covered observation areas – particularly the one at the end of the public wharf, which sported lots of shade and cool, inviting concrete picnic tables.

Prevailing Wins warming up for their first heat.

The end of the wharf also provided a magnificent view of the boats as they left the marina – and, of course, as they returned. You’ll find a lot of those shots in my collection.

I have uploaded photos from the event to FaceBook’s BC Dragon Boat Paddlers group.

As some of you already know, I’m not a fan of the over-emphasis upon breast cancer and the entire pink scene, but when the Coach of Phoenix Rising told me the organizers were looking for cancer survivors to fill the boats, and encouraged me to join in the fun, I decided to go for it. The thought that I hadn’t paddled in more than two years did occur to me, but survivor friends convinced me no one would care.

Enter Powell River’s Paddling for Life Society dragon boat team, who, in spite of my 240 out-of-shape pounds, graciously made room for me in their boat. I discovered what 2.5 years of sloth had done almost immediately, as I found I couldn’t paddle more than 30 or 4o strokes before running out of air. In spite of my obvious handicap, not one of those lovely ladies offered anything but welcoming encouragement – even when I broke my own “coach’s cardinal rules” by pulling my paddle in the middle of our race to catch my breath.

Ladies, you’re a class act, and you made my day. THANK YOU for letting me share your race. It was wonderful to get out on the water again and remind myself of what attracted me to the sport in the first place.

On Small Festivals

When Nanaimo’s Phoenix Rising was formed as a mixed cancer survivor’s team in 2006, we chose “Fun, fitness & fellowship” as our goals. We scheduled a single race that year – the Sproat Lake Challenge – because it was held in September (which gave us oodles of time to prepare ourselves), and because it was <u>fun</u>, and – for us – non-threatening. We weren’t going to win, but we were damned well going to be first in our lane – which our coach said was all we really needed to do.

We finished first in the Bronze division and learned the first lesson offered by small festivals: Almost <u>everybody</u> gets bling.  That was a big plus, particularly for recreational teams like ours.

The Sproat Lake Challenge was cheap, too – the entry fee was $105, easily within the means of a new team that didn’t know the meaning of “fundraising” and hadn’t set a dime aside for the event – or anything else.

Since that time, small festivals have prospered all over the Island: Campbell River’s “Race the River,” now planning for its third year; VCKC’s “Guts & Glory” and “Champion Sprints,” now planning its fourth event, the Comox regatta and the TriPort festival…and any others I haven’t heard of yet. All of these events share attractive features: their fees are generally affordable, they are small and likely to stay that way, and they are a <u>lot</u> of fun.

Nanaimo’s festival suffered this year from a sharp decline in participation, probably a reflection of the economic downturn on both sides of the border, while the smaller events grew.

Big festivals (like Nanaimo’s) are a lot of fun, and have a lot to offer paddlers – the small festivals can’t compete, but it’s obvious that they neither want to or have to. They’re just the right size to appeal to anyone who’s looking for a lot of fun without a lot of expense.

Gotta love that

 

Photographs from the 2012 VCKC Champion Sprints are available on Facebook in the BC Dragon Boat Paddlers group.

Selkirk Serpents Compete in 2012 VCKC Champion Sprints

Unfortunately, technical problems led to the loss of the last 100 photos taken, for which I apologize…alas, it could not be helped…

My PC sports an Intel RAID 1 (redundant array of independent disks) disk controller. What this means is that the system uses two 900 GB hard disks which are read by the controller as a single 1.8 TB disk. This is great for people who work with very large files…more to the point, it’s even greater for people who cannot afford to lose their data, as everything written to one disk is automatically – and simultaneously – written to the other disk.

One of my two disks failed a week or so back, leaving me with a whole bucket full of problems, not the least of which was the inability to get to my photographs.

Like many of you, however, I’ve been using personal computers for a long time – since 1982, in fact – and I’ve lost more important data than Aspirin has pills. Because of that, a few months ago I decided to subscribe to an online backup service called JustCloud.

JustCloud automatically backs up my system, moving copies of whatever files I select to the cloud.

While I was working on my Nanaimo Dragon Boat Festival photographs, the disk known as “DISK0″ (Disk Zero) crashed and burned. By pulling an all-nighter, I was able to get Windows to get the disk going long enough to upload the photos to Flickr and Facebook, and, more importantly, to JustCloud.

The Windows-applied bandaids kept the system going until last Saturday night; while I was uploading some 750 images from the Champion Sprints, DISK0 expired. Because my image import software was set to delete photos from my camera as they were downloaded to the computer (boy, was that stupid), I had no backup, and the 100 or so photos that had not yet made it to Facebook vanished into thin air.

In order to get around the bad disk, I had to remove it from the computer. Once I’d done that, I was able to install Windows on DISK1 and get back to business…alas, it will take a week or more to restore all my photos and music.

1982? Time flies when you’re having fun

 

Photos for the 2012 Nanaimo festival are available on Facebook. Photos from Saturday, July 7, have been posted.

Click here for the  BC Dragon Boat Paddlers Facebook set.

Note on photo quality: I use a Canon 75-300mm telephoto lens (“zoom”), and it’s inadequate for the distances involved as far as racing photos are concerned. Photos taken of the racing (as opposed to people) will be taken at extreme range, and may appear blurry when viewed. Unfortunately, this cannot be helped. With limited access to the race course and the lens’ limitations, closeups simply aren’t possible.

Chix With Stix celebrating their victory.

 

350+ photographs from the June 30, 2012 Race the River festival are now online. Here are the Flickr links:

Click here for the Flickr slide show, and here for the photo set.

Here is the Facebook link:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/BC-Dragon-Boat-Paddlers/205946012769052