Dragonboating begins 2007

On Monday night, our dragonboating team restarted practices for 2007. We met down at the docks around 7pm and started teaching our new paddlers, and reminding our old ones, of the techniques and procedures for dragonboating. We put on our lifejackets and grabbed our paddles and headed down to the river. With all the rain Edmonton has received in the last week, the river was flowing really fast and we had to have a full compliment of 20 paddlers in order to go on the water. Usually, in comparison, we need a minimum of 14 paddlers to take to the water, so you can imagine how fast the river was flowing. In fact, I've rarely seen the river that fast!

We encountered a problem when we reached the dock - they had changed the dock configuration this year so that it was one long dock that ran parallel to shore, rather than an 'L' shape like last year. Instead, we had two large wood planks that we were supposed to use to climb from shore to the dock, neither of which was long enough on its own to reach straight from shore to the dock. After some thinking and fiddling, we managed to set up a precarious bridge that we used to get to dock.

There we loaded up the boat and got out of the dock with little trouble. Once on the water, we carried out our practice as usual, except that the river current prevented us from getting very far at any point. As well, the currents in the river were strong and I was a little more nervous when we were out there, especially since I was a little out of practice, having not steered the boat since last year. In the end, everything went well and we made it back to dock smoothly, although the fast current worried some paddlers when we were just drifting backwards downriver on some of our rest breaks.