Vernon

Lots to say, long blog post coming up.

Was a good weekend of Dragonboat racing in Vernon. Good competition, some fun in the evenings, etc. Still nothing like Kelowna in previous years, or even some other out of town festivals. And one unhappy thing about learning something I really didn't want to hear.

Fun started with waiting for someone for over an hour after the rest of us had met up. And then someone locked her keys in the car, but while she was off getting spare keys using someone else's car, we broke into her car. Scarily easy actually. Anyways, the drive out was pretty uneventful, though we had an 'alarm' in the back seat go off whenever we took a corner too fast. Once at the hotel, they didn't have the cot in the room that we reserved. So the front desk tried to find one, but couldn't. So they gave us a whole separate room. We were just getting into bed when he phoned the room to tell us he found one and we had to take it and return to the original room. Annoying. Should've just let us stay, we'd already messed up the beds and such.

Race site was ok, a beach area, pretty crowded with team tents, a swimming area in the lake roped off, a few food places but not much. Got hot pretty early, especially in the sandy area. For warm ups we retreated to a grassy knoll. Took 2nd place in both our 200m races against some good teams. 200m is so short! Sometime in the morning someone confirmed my unhappy suspicions. But kindof cool that someone else noticed something was bothering me. oh well. Had some lunch, tried something that I didn't know what it was (Ciabatta... pronounced it wrong, to some teammates amusement, just like in lethbridge festival) but me having it encouraged some strangers to get it too. Later in the day had our 500m, another 2nd place. After the races, played around in the lake a while. With my shirt off, Arnold said: "Scott, I've paddled with you for like 8 years... and you're still sooo white!!" At the end of the day a bunch of people were going down to kelowna to find a steakhouse, I kindof wanted to go with, but I didn't feel very invited, and someone had made reservations at a local restaurant for the whole team. Even though it wouldn't be a team dinner, it would be nice to have most people there. The food turned out not that great. That's the other main thing that bothered me about the weekend: so much wasted food. At the dinner, portions were bigger than expected and quality was poorer than expected. I hate wasted food, but though I could finish mine and take some others, there's no way I can help finish several peoples meal or take it away, especially if it's not good. The next day at breakfast, same sort of thing seemed to be happening, though it wasn't poor quality, just people got more than they wanted. Annoying. Sun evening Jay and I got some food from the supermarket across the street, I got us some fruit and some cheese/onion buns and some deli ham and prepped those sun morning, so we had (what I considered) some decent food sunday.

The coolest race of race weekend was the 1000m exhibition. Cool enough to describe it all here. Start at the finish, go 500m, U-turn, go 500m back to start. Teams race simultaneously, but start 10 seconds apart. We were the third to go. So, team1 started 20 sec ahead, team2 10 sec ahead. We felt really powerful though... it wasn't long before we were catching up to those ahead of us. They started on our right side, but we moved across to pass on the left side (would be outside of the turn). I think team2 was doing that to prepare to pass team1. We were starting to pass team2, when suddenly up ahead we noticed (I was on right side and saw above left stroke) team1 had lost control and was coming across in front of us. Team2 and us checked boat hard, team2 stopped in time, but we still hit the team1 (though not hard). Called to check they were okay, they seemed to be, team2 started up again once their way was clear, and we did a few seconds later when our way was too. A whole new start. By this time, team4 who started 10sec after us had passed us all, but we were catching up to team4 and team2 again. Started passing them on the turn, I think all three of us were in the turn together. Awesome. We were passing on the outside. I think team4 didn't turn as sharp, or straighten out enough, and started pushing team2 to the right (where we were). Not sure if they collided. We kept our stance, and soon our lefts were clashing paddles with their rights. I heard some upset comments from the other boat, but thought "I better not hear those things coming from our boat!" I didn't, and we powered through it, and soon we were clear of team2. Were also passing team4 on their other side. In the open water, raced away and crossed the finish line first! About 4 secs ahead of team4, but since they had started 10sec after us, they still took first place. But it was still a really cool race, like voyageur crossed with dragonboat, and we felt really strong throughout, and it felt cool to be passing teams that had significant leads. I guess if they really wanted to avoid collisions, they'd line up the teams in order of fastest to slowest. But that would be less fun.

Sunday morning race was important, we had to come in 1 or 2, and we were against a team we knew we wouldn't beat, and a fellow calgary team who we are often well matched against. But we pulled together and sent Yahoo home. Too bad for them, but it was either them or us. (So that makes five 2nd place finishes). So from that, we got into the A-division finals! Were against gorging dragons, pacific reach, sudden impact, without warning, and calgary race club. Realized afterwards that all of them are trying out for nationals. Pretty cool to be up against that calibre of team. We crossed the finish line in 4th apparently (though some spectators said 3rd) but officially we came in 5th. Some sort of crap, since one team bumped another midway through the race, and they came in 5th and 6th, but someone complained and instead of reracing, they just promoted the the team that got bumped up to 4th place. Overall, it doesn't really matter, but it's still a stupid thing to do. So the official times show 0.4 seconds between 3rd and 5th.

Next cool thing to do was the waterskiier challenge! Get the boat out into the water, get a waterskiier on the end of a line behind the boat, and go for it. I'd like to see more videos of this, since I was still not wearing prescription after our grand finale, I couldn't see the other teams too well, and then of course when we were paddling, can't see what's happening with our waterskiier. Sounds like many didn't get their skiier up, or got them half way up and were rising and falling halfway. But we got ours up out of the water really quick! And then we were so smooth with our sprint stroke (rather than the jerky normal stroke) that he was even able to go one handed and do a silly wave or something. We ended up winning the waterskiier challenge, and that's really worth more to the club than anything else, cause it's free registration to next year's festival (like $1000 value).

While waiting near show to come in (no dock, just beach the boat), got into a water fight with CRC, then they capsized themselves, then ran through the shallow water to our boat to tip us. Seems fun, but is actually pretty stupid, when you have a boat flipping and people falling on each other and everyone holding a long wooden paddle, someone'll get hurt (and someone did get a paddle to the face).

Packed up and left pretty soon after that. Didn't get back into Calgary till about 3AM. The rest of the team was back around midnight. A few reasons: Stopped at Wal-mart to change and but something (instead of changing before leaving the festival for some reason). Stopped at Enchanted Forest near Revelstoke, had always been curious about that place! It was neat, lots of little fairy tale statues and buildings and stuff, and always nice to be set out in the forest. Would be a very different experience depending on who you're with, I was with a couple kindof crazy silly people, so it was fun running and skipping around and crawling into little houses and stuff. But we had to rush since we knew we'd be late back to calgary. Stopped in Revelstoke to eat at an actual restaurant instead of drive-through for some reason... took a while to search for restaurants, and then of course took a while to show up and eat (while waiting, our 5? yr old companion said to the waitress "excuse me, I'm starving here!", it was hilarious!). On the road was fine, it was just those things that delayed our return. I didn't do any driving on the way back... I generally feel kindof lonely at the ending of stuff like this where you're with people constantly for a few days, so I was happy enough feeling cozy and relaxed in the back of the van.

Wow Calgary was cold when we got back... were shivering! Though it was still 18C according to a sign I saw.

Well, that's a long blab, perhaps unnecessarily long, but whatever. It was fun.