This past weekend the 19th annual Tim Horton’s Ottawa Dragon Boat Festival was held in Mooney’s Bay Park. With over 200 teams taking part this year, it has become the largest dragonboat festival in the world. Because they’ve increased the number of teams, they changed up the schedule a bit and moved the charity pledge challenge races from Saturday to Friday evening and changed the format of the races on the Sunday so that everyone had three races on Sunday: a 200m race, 100m sprint and 500m race. In past years, the shorter 100m and 200m races were exhibition races for the top-ranked teams. Personally, I liked the variety of races on Sunday, particularly the 100m sprint.

As in past years, I steered for the Algonquin College Singapore Slings and we’re happy with our results (even though we didn’t win our challenge cup this year):

Day	Race	Time
Friday	Pledge challenge (500m)	2:24.47
Saturday	Hospitality & Tourism Challenge Cup (500m)	2:25.19
	Block 4 Final (500m)	2:32.20
Sunday	200m Mixed H Final	0:56.05
	100m Mixed H Final	0:28.16
	The Ottawa Citizen 500m Mixed H Final	2:28.12

The Slings were one of the top fund-raising teams again this year, so we got to race Friday evening. Many thanks to everyone who sponsored us!

I also steered one race for a women’s team called Domina. They raced well, but sadly at the end of Saturday they missed advancing to Sunday by less than one second! 🙁

This year they put together some all-men’s teams for an exhibition 200m race. Many of the men paddlers from the Slings got together with paddlers from a couple of other teams and raced against 5 or 6 other teams. The power in the boat was pretty impressive and we had a lot of fun!

Overall, the weather was just about perfect all weekend. There was a little burst of rain Sunday afternoon, but that was it.

A big thank you to the volunteers who kept the races running smoothly, but most of all a big thank you to everyone on the teams I steered for: You guys paddled well and should be proud of your results!

Once again this year, I am steering a dragon boat in the Ottawa Dragon Boat Festival for the Algonquin College Singapore Slings. New for this year is that I’m also steering for a women’s team called Domina. 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 teams reach their pledge targets and thus help the various charities selected by the ODBF, please consider clicking here or 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. 🙂

It’s been a fairly busy June and I haven’t been blogging as frequently as I’d like so I thought I’d post a quick summary of things.

Since my last post, I took part in the Tim Horton’s Ottawa Dragon Boat Festival steering for the Algonquin College Singapore Slings. I’m proud to report that we have once again won the Mill Street Brewery Hospitality Challenge Cup. If memory serves me correct, this is at least the fourth time that we’ve won it since I joined the team. We also raised almost $8000 for the local charities sponsored by the Ottawa Dragon Boat Foundation.

Last weekend I joined the Ottawa Valley Mobile Radio Club (OVMRC) at their Field Day station (VE3RAM), which was set up in front of the Canada Science and Technology Museum. With the exception of one voice contact on 6m SSB, I operated several shifts on the digital mode station. There were a few notable contacts, including Igor (RU6CH) in Russia and two French stations that I chatted with around 2am while the bands were dead. The 30m contacts didn’t earn us any points, but it was nice to have an actual conversation and I even got to use my French. 🙂 Last I heard, the digital station made 188 contacts, which is respectable. I think we were the only ones at the OVMRC Field Day to operate the full 24 hours — some people wimped out an actually slept!

Other than that I’ve been to the climbing gym a couple of times and I’m looking forward to getting out on real rock as soon as my climbing buddies and I can find a mutually convenient time.

As far as what I’m doing for Canada Day, that’s still in the air (and yes, I do realize it’s June 30th!). The options include heading downtown with the mobs of people to Parliament Hill, heading to Kemptville to watch fireworks there or escape the city to the lake for the weekend. All have their merits, so I remain undecided.

I’ve been steering dragonboats for ten years, so my view of dragonboat races is probably quite different than that of a paddler (who should be following the paddle in front of them during the race!) or the caller (who doesn’t get to see where we’re going) — I’m really the only one in the boat who gets to see where we’re going! At my team‘s practice on Saturday I wore a tiny POV camera and recorded some of the practice. The owner of the camera has posted the video on YouTube and it’s definitely worth a view.

You can see videos from other practices on our team website.

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 here or 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. 🙂

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.

Our second race took place around 5pm, a bit later than expected due to some delays in the morning. The wind has much more of a factor in this race because it was more of a crosswind and made lining up at the start a bit more of a challenge. That combined with choppier water meant that steering was tougher, but our finish time of 2:15.44 was still better than our best time from the last few years. (Most times in the afternoon races were quite a bit slower than the morning.)

Overall, this puts us in 32nd place for the mixed teams, which we’re very happy with.

We also raised enough money through donations that we had a third race, but that time wasn’t available when this was being written.

Many thanks to everyone who sponsored me! Your donations helped the team raise $5257.00 for the Ottawa Dragon Boat Foundation charities so far!