I originally wrote this for my dragonboat team, the Algonquin College Singapore Slings, and I thought it might be of interest to a wider audience.

If you’ve been dragonboating for a couple of years, you’ve probably heard your steersman or caller issue instructions such as “check the boat”, “all up”, “right side draw” or “let it run”. And you (hopefully) know what the person wants you to do. But, if you’re new to dragonboating, it might be Greek to you.

So, to help demystify things, here’s a list of the most common things your steersman is likely to say and what they want you to do.

In general, when you’re paddling, whether it’s paddling easy during a practice, drawing at the start line or during the race, all the paddlers should be hitting at the same time. If even one person is out a bit, the paddlers around them will tend to get off beat.

Happy paddling!

I had a lot of fun this past weekend. Saturday started with a dragonboat practice followed by brunch with some of the other people on the Algonquin College Singapore Slings. Once sated, I did a bunch of errands that saw me drive back and forth across Ottawa from place to place. Tiring of that, I headed out on my bike along the Ottawa River path to the top of the locks and into the Market for gelato at Piccolo Grande on Murray. Happily full of a double-chocolate gelato that had big chunks of white chocolate in it, I headed back towards the Cenotaph to check out the festivities related to the Ottawa Race Weekend.

To say the area was crowded would be a bit like saying the Pacific Ocean has a lot of water in it.

Most of the roads were closed to cars because they were packed with people. People who had just finished a race, people who were getting ready to race, people who were in a race, people who were watching the races and people who were trying to figure out how they could get to where they wanted to be given all the road closures and people.

A friend of mine was doing the 10 km race, so I found a good vantage point near the first turn and waited for the race to start.

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Once again this year, I am steering a dragon boat in the Ottawa Dragon Boat Festival for the Algonquin College Singapore Slings.  And like the other teams in the festival, we’re taking part in the pledge challenge raising money that will go to support the charities selected by the Ottawa Dragon Boat Foundation. These charities do very important work in the Ottawa area and are worth supporting.

If you’d like to help my team reach its pledge target and thus help the various charities selected by the ODBF, please consider clicking on the link at the top of the right column, and sponsoring me.  All donations of $20 or more automatically receive a tax receipt and you can request one for donations of less than $20.

Many thanks for reading this and thinking about it.  And a special thank you if you do sponsor me. 🙂

One more lesson learned from the recent balloon chasing is that finding a large pink foam cube in the middle of a field isn’t as easy as it sounds, even if you’re within a couple of dozen metres of it.  This might be mitigated by installing a noise maker in the payload package might make them easier to find. If they had something like a piezo electric beeper, or the siren from a smoke detector, in them that sounded for 5 seconds every minute it would give you something to home in on when the payload is on the ground/in a tree/floating downstream/whatever.

Weight being a concern when you’re launching things to the edge of space, such a noise maker would have to be very miserly in terms of its power requirements so that the existing power supply could be used rather than requiring a bigger – and thus heavier – one.

Last weekend, I headed out with Darin (VE3OIJ) to help chase a pair of weather balloons that were being launched from Perth by the Lanark Space Agency (LASA). One of the balloons, VE3LCA-11, had a payload with a GPS, camera, temperature sensor and an APRS beacon. It’s goal was to take pictures over the course of its flight for the Grades 5 and 6 students from St. John’s School it was being launched for.

The launch was well-attended by students, parents, visitors to the farmers’ market and many of the chase teams. After the obligatory group photo with the students and the balloon, they did a count down and released the balloon and its payload. It disappeared into the clouds about 4500’ AGL, so we watched its progress on the display they had set up for people to watch.

Meanwhile, the second balloon, VE3REX-11 (aka LASA 4), was prepped for launch. It’s goal was to set an altitude record for amateur weather balloons. It’s payload consisted solely of a small GPS and an APRS beacon, which weighed less than the first balloon. It was launched off in due order, so we headed off, stopping only to buy some homemade cookies from the farmers’ market.

We decided to chase VE3LCA-11 since its payload needed to be retrieved more than VE3REX-11’s.

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Back in October, I wrote about the cars I’ve owned over the years. At the time, the list consisted of a 1987 Eurosport, a 1991 Pontiac Firefly and a 2002 GM Tracker. Well, it’s time to update the list.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the tailpipe on the Tracker was a bit loose, so I visited Active Green + Ross on Bank Street who worked up an interim solution for me for free. That was meant to tide things over until I had a more permanent repair made. Replacing everything from just behind the catalytic converter to the tailpipe would probably have cost a couple of hundred dollars. The Tracker was also due for a brake job and an alignment (several hundred more dollars). And I’d been thinking that the battery was probably due for replacement after seven years of service.

That’s about when I stopped adding up things and started looking at new vehicles.

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I went geocaching yesterday afternoon for the first time in a couple of months and I hit a neat milestone with the last cache I found. GAG9 – One for the birds (GCYJ1E) by model12 & Aldy marked the 450th geocache I’ve found. It also marked the 350th geocache I’ve found in the province of Ontario.

The geocaching gods were taunting me as I homed in on it, because when I was just a few metres away from the cache my GPS receiver suddenly indicated the cache was 160m away, +/- 186m and continued to jump around. I thought that perhaps I’d lost a clear view of the sky, but the satellite screen seemed to indicate it had locked on to 6 or 8 satellites with strong signals. When I moved a bit farther away, the GPSr settled down and I found the cache quickly.

It was nice getting out caching again.  Life has been so busy, or the weather has been so sucky, that I just haven’t had time to seek any geocaches. However, things are less busy (I think) and the weather is more conducive to being outside that I’ll probably start caching a little more regularly.