Saturday was the 9th annual Fall 400 dragonboat races in Carleton Place. The weather was perfect for racing, with sunshine and almost no wind and the Algonquin College Singapore Slings were in fine form.

Altogether, we had three 400m races. Our first race of the day saw us set a new team best for 400m, 01:49.73. Our second race was 1:52.22 and our third race was 1:50.13. The combined times of our best two races was 3:39.92, which put us in 13th place out of 44 teams.

After the first race, my throat was quite sore from yelling the signals to our caller and calling the series and finish. Fortunately, a couple of other people on the team were heading out to do some shopping so I tagged along and picked up some industrial-strength lozenges (aka Cepacol), which helped immensely. I sucked up a far from recommended number of them before the end of the day, but my throat felt better for it.

So, that’s the end of dragonboat racing for this year. It was a great year overall and we improved immensely as a team. I’m looking forward to the 2011 season and just wish we could keep practicing every week.