Jump in experience II

Since I wasn't in edmonton, I came out to the mini dragonboat race event today. It was put on by some calgary clubs since Sylvan Lake was canceled. Nice and informal, it was great for our club, since we had many new steers and drummers this year, an opportunity to practice in real races without the pressure of a big race festival. We had enough people to make an adult and a (mostly) youth team. I steered the youth for the first race while Carol steered the adults. It all went pretty well, nothing too exciting, though a couple boats crossed the finish in different lanes than they started. For the second race, Carol stayed with her boat but I got bumped so Matt could practice. This was the 'exciting' race of the weekend... one boat lost control and cut both our boats off... well not quite, the youth team probably could have kept going and taken advantage of the situation, but they paused for a bit. Adult boat had to check hard, and there were no collisions, but had some trouble getting back on track after that. I wish I'd been steering one of the boats for that, would've been fun! I was helping in the timing booth for that race so I got a pretty good view. I then went out with "wave runners", a team that needed to borrow paddlers from other teams. So weird paddling with a different team, with different rate, strategy, skill, etc. Also feels weird (and I noticed this in other festivals this year) to see people with carbon fibre paddles (which suggests they're a pretty comp team) but not really being a great dragonboat team. The guy in front of me wasn't even looking up for timing, but I felt I shouldn't be telling them what to do. I went totally intense for that race though, I bet my eyes looked like Roneel's :) Guy beside me (borrowed from our parents/youth team I think) stopped paddling for a couple chunks of the race, I didn't feel good about that. For the final races, I got to steer the adult team as Carol switched to paddling. Charlene tried to move me back to the youth but I didn't let her. I wanted the experience with a regular mixed boat. And I'd really rather steer for a regular mixed team than a youth or parents or masters team. So, for the final, we had three-in-a-row 250m races. 4 teams started, and each race one got eliminated and the rest returned immediately to start line to race again. In the first race I felt like I almost lost control right before the finish line! But I didn't. The boat felt really shakey that race, though it turned out the best time. I was also pleased with how I efficiently got back into position again at the start line. The next two races felt much better and were much easier to steer. Not much communication going on between drummer and steers though, I didn't get signals to call the powers, though I could join the "now" part. I felt like I should be saying more though, maybe just shout "come on!" or something...

Anyways, after doing todays races, I feel much better again for steering some races in calgary. The main things I'm still not sure about are setting up in the staging area / start line, since it will be more serious next time (and may have weird starting contraption), and having to organize whoever I'm steering for before/after their race (for that I'm mainly just lazy and would rather hang out with people than have to be chasing people down).