Dragon boating on the Thames

Today I went dragon boating on the Thames. I was invited to go by Sarah, who was supposed to be there too. She was meant to arrive back in London, after a month visiting her family in Australia, on Friday (i.e. two days ago). However, she got sick and postponed her flight. She should be here on Thursday this coming week.

Fortunately, Sarah wasn't the only person who knew the people organising the dragon boating team. Kate (Sarah's housemate, and also someone we went to high school with) had met some of them once. Better than nothing. So I went along with Kate to the location of the dragon boating event, where we were to meet the others.

The dragon boat races are an annual charity event organised by the Kingston upon Thames Rotary club. The team that Kate and I were to be a part of was organised by the Wimbledon Rotaract club (Rotaract is like Rotary for under 30s).

For anyone who doesn't know, a dragon boat is a long, narrow boat which is crewed by two rows of people with paddles. For the races today (I'm not sure if it's always the case), we could have between 12 and 16 paddlers. There is also a drummer at the front to keep everyone paddling in time and someone at the back steering. Although our paddlers and our drummer were all amateurs (one person in our team had done it once before), fortunately the steerers were experienced and were provided by the race organisers. They also served as our instructors.

Each team had three heats. Each heat consisted of two boats racing over a 250 metre course. What mattered in the heats was the time, not whether we came in first or second. Each team's best time out of their three heats would be used to seed the team for the finals.

Before our first heat (and before we were allowed in the boat), we were given instructions on technique, along the lines of this is how you hold the paddle, and when I say this, do that, etc. Our first heat was about the tenth race of round one, so we'd had a bit of time to watch some other teams. I overheard some of my team mates criticising the other teams on their lack of synchronised paddling, but once we got in the boat, we realised it was much harder than it looked. Apart from the fact that we came close to capsizing (and I had thought the "If we capsize..." part of our pre-race talk was just a formality), we did struggle with paddling in time as much as anyone else. In our first heat, I repeatedly clashed paddles with the person behind me, though I'm pretty sure she was the one with the timing issues!

For this first race, we were paddling against one of the dragon boat club teams. A little unfair you may think. It wasn't so bad though. Although we were sharing heats, they were competing for a club teams only final and were not eligible for the open final. Still, given that they crossed the finish line a good 20 seconds before we did, it was a bit depressing. They got a sub-one minute time. We got just over 1 minute, 19 seconds.

In the second heat, we did much better. We didn't almost fall out. There weren't nearly as many paddle clashes (though I wasn't sitting in front of the same girl this time), and we improved by over 8 seconds! Our time was just under 1 minute 11 seconds. We also beat the other team in our heat, the "Rainbow Girls". I forgot to mention, our team name was the "Wet Wombles" (this was decided by someone else before the event).

To me, our third heat seemed better again. We had a different steerer to the first two heats, who was more instructive on getting us to paddle in time. Again, we were against a club team, but they didn't seem nearly so far in front this time. Alas, we only improved our time by 43 hundredths of a second, and didn't manage to get below the 1 minute 10 second mark. Oh well. We'd had fun and there was no risk of us being in the finals. I don't think anyone in the team was too disappointed about that.