The Scientist: Dragonboat festival 2007

This past weekend was the 11th annual Edmonton Dragonboat Festival, and the second annual participation by the Department of MMI's dragonboat team, named "22 Scientists in a boat". While this is a bit of a misnomer, because we also had a psychiatry graduate student, an archivist and several friends or family of scientists, we were over 90% scientists and felt justified in using our name again this year. As well, and perhaps predictably, we dressed similar attire to last year - that is, as nerdy scientists.

You'll find me right in the middle, wearing the white wig and red tutu-like skirt.

In any case, we raced a bunch this weekend, and finally made good on our months of practicing on the North Saskatchewan River. Our first race was on Friday night, where we entered the Health Care Challenge Cup. There were 8 teams entered in this race, and since only 3 can race per heat, it was a matter of which team attained the fastest time to determine the winner of the cup. We raced in a heat with just one other team, and came out way ahead of them with a time of 2 minutes 58 seconds. This turned out to be the best time of all the boats, by a fairly decent margin, so we expected we already had the Cup in the bag. However, we had to re-prove ourselves on Saturday afternoon after our other two races, by re-racing the two teams with the second and third best times. Again, we came out victorious with a strong lead and a time of 3 minutes 4 seconds.
Here are some pictures from that race - Garrett was on shore, cheering us on and taking some cool shots of us paddling.
Taking 'er out of dock:

Bonnie's roommate Jessica kindly agreed to be our drummer for the weekend on last minute's notice:

Garrett took some clustered action shots, so you can see our paddles coming in and out of the water in synchronized fashion:

It doesn't look like it in the above pictures, but we were totally winning that race - the race lanes were not straight relative to shore. You can tell a little better in this picture that we are ahead of the boat in the farthest lane:

Now, skipping back in time to our regular races for the rest of the festival - we started out bright and early on Saturday morning with a race time of 9am. Since we had to be there an hour early all the time, it was a pretty early start for all of us. However, we showed up with bells on and took to the water with a time of 3 minutes 5 seconds. Fairly respectable, and much faster than a lot of other teams. Again, we were first in our heat, although it didn't matter much except for our time compared to other boats overall. Our second race on Saturday was at 2pm in the afternoon, and it was the only race where we didn't cross the finish line first in our heat - instead, we were second. Our time, however, was only 3 minutes 7 seconds, which we were happy with because the water was flowing a lot faster by then (due to rain and the upstream dam releasing water). Here are some pictures of our afternoon race:
Backing out of dock. It's hard to tell, but the dock was really close to the rocks on shore and the current was really fast, so it was a wee bit tricky keeping the boats intact while still making our turn to head downstream to the start line.

Here we are at the start line, way down there by the bridge. We are in the right-most lane (look for the white lab coats):

Here we are in the race - you can see the team in the closest lane is ahead of us:

And after the race, we relaxed for a moment before bringing it into dock:

After our 2pm race, we raced in the final of the Health Care Challenge Cup, which I already told you about. Here I am on shore before that race, checking out the current and movement of the water before our race - we were in a different lane than we'd been in before, so I wanted to see how the other boats were moving:

Sunday morning arrived with a late race time - 10:15 - since we had been quite fast on Saturday. In fact, we were within the top 12 of the festival! That was amazing, considering we are a fairly new team that doesn't practice intensely and was in the festival for fun. We raced with a time of 3 minute 4 seconds, which we were happy with since it was probably our least coordinated race of the weekend. This time put us in the finals for the Borealis A division - basically, in the top three of the B pool. We went home and relaxed before coming back for our final at 3:30pm.

Our final race was by far our best and most spectacular of the whole festival. We raced against two teams, however one of them, called the "Loyal Eddies" and consisting of a bunch of military personel, were very close to us in time from the rest of the festival, and proved it once they were in the water next to us. They started off a little bit ahead of us after our race start, but as the race continued, we not only caught up to them, but passed them slightly. It was quite evident in this race that our endurance really counted towards our win, because halfway through the race, the Loyal Eddies started slowing down a bit, but the Scientists kept going strong, responding to my more frequent calls for POWER!! Everyone in the boat could tell the race was tight by the view of the boat in our peripheral vision, and by the shorter times between my calls for more power. In the end, we beat the Loyal Eddies by 2 seconds and hit our overall best time of 2 minutes 49 seconds!! We shaved a whole thirteen seconds off of our time by having a tight race! We were super excited, especially since we had won gold for the B pool! As well, we ended up only being 9 seconds slower than the team that won the entire festival.

In the end, we won a number of awards. First of all, I won the 'Best Dressed Steersperson' award. This was pretty easy to win, since I was the ONLY steersperson dressed up!