2nd place and 32nd place

Today was our main race day at the dragonboat festival. We had an early start at 9:20am, considering we had to be there about an hour early for our race. This morning we raced in Lane 1, which is the heavier, slower lane. We had a decent time at 2 min 31 secs, even though we could definately tell the water slowed us down. After our race, our awesome costumes earned us a spot on the Global News live morning show!! It was very exciting for us. I introduced us into the microphone and then we sang our team cheer to the camera! None of us got to see the footage, but I'm going to email them to see if we can get a copy. Our cheer goes as follows:

"22 Scientist in a boat,
Will we sink or will we float?
When we win we're gonna gloat,
22 Scientists in a boat!"

Here's a team photo taken shortly after that:Yes, I have a bike helmet on. It's part of my costume.

So it turns out we did qualify for the Novice Cup Final today, so we raced again at 11:30 against the other two top teams. Now, one of the other teams we were racing did not seem like novices - most had their own life jackets and paddles! We were not sure whether the race organizers let anyone register in the novice cup, or whether they actually check if a team is mostly novice. So in any case, we raced this pretty awesome team. We paddled hard and really dug deep, until we were neck and neck as we neared the finish line. I think our paddlers started looking over at the other boat near the end of the race though, because all of a sudden our timing was off and our boat started turning! This was a big problem for me because I had to correct our course so we wouldn't go outside the race buoy and be disqualified. I worked really hard at the oar to get us back in line and managed to keep us inside the buoy, but we lost some valuable time in our zig-zagging and ended up second. We were fairly disappointed, until we found out that we get medals for second place! Yay!
Here's our boat as we headed out to start our Novice Cup Final race:And here's the finish of the race. See how close it was!After some lunch, we raced our last heat at 1pm and had our best race yet. Even though our time wasn't as fast as Friday night (2 min 21 sec - the river was faster flowing today than yesterday), we were really tight with our timing and the paddlers really put it on to beat a very good team in the adjacent lane. We felt so great after that race and were overall happy with our performance for the day. We also had a lot of support in the crowd for this race, so we were pumped to perform well for our friends!
Here we are pulling away from the dock. That's me in the lab coat at the back!The finish line is marked on the far shore with the yellow pipe. Look how close we were at the finish again! We are the farthest team in the picture (brown boat). It turned out we beat that other team by 9 tenths of a second. And here we are pulling in to dock at the end of our day.Lastly, here is the team one last time in front of the Edmonton Dragon Boat Festival Banner:We ended up 32nd overall, out of 48 teams, which I think is pretty good. I'd like to point out that the team that beat us in the Novice Cup was WAY up in the team rankings, further convincing me that they shouldn't have been in that race with us. We race tomorrow morning and once more in the afternoon. Hopefully we can acquit ourselves just as well tomorrow, even though we'll be sore and tired!