Harrison Festival

I’m writing this from my personal experience… i won’t try to analyze what went wrong, blahblahblah… you can read Dragonboatwest for that drama and flaming!

I called for SOAR and SF for all their races and re-races. 11 races in total. My throat is paying for it this morning but not from calling, just being out in the rain… I’ve called for SOAR at Lotus and Kent, so I’m familiar with the team by Harrison. They are so nice! If Ben and co. doesn’t stop the physical and emotional abuse at practice, I’m going to SOAR! Wait, that won’t make a difference eh… j/k. Anyway, I really feel like I’m part of SOAR and I was really proud of them when we won the Rec B Silver.

We had to re-race with SF in our first 2 races. As a caller, i was already spent. I can’t imagine what it would be like for the paddlers. But we ended up racing and placing the same as the first race. Since it was based on times, it was taken from our times in the re-races so that kinda sucked a bit but oh well, that’s racing.

We were placed in the Rec C semi-finals. Turns out that they calculated THREE of our times! lol… after they realized the mistake, we were placed in our correct division, Rec A.

One thing that I’ve learned after I was placed in Rec C (before they fixed it) was that there are a lot of ppl that came up to me and was like WTF? I got a lot of supportive comments from random paddlers on other teams. hehe… except one guy came up to me to say that we deserve to be in Rec C and laughed (I found out later that his team made Rec A) at me twice.

In the semis, I had to deal with a broken drum after the 3rd stroke. I could’ve just chucked it aside into the water and cause a re-race or risk DQ (since the friendly fish has a fan club of dedicated admirers who watch us closely for DQs ;D) so I carried the drum like a crazy mofo throughout the race. I dropped it after the finish line though… these things are not light!

We all waited out to race our last race at around 7:30pm in the rain (my last races on both teams were back-to-back) and we all ready to get it over with and go home. They double-checked our bracelets (someone requested to make sure it’s all SF paddlers) and questioned one of our paddler that was wearing a plain white T-shirt over her jersey. Double-checking Swordfish jerseys and bracelets… maybe that was the cause of the delays… haha!

There were 5 teams on our heat. It was a very close race with Ready Jet Go and I called my little heart out (I swear everything else almost came out in the finish). We came in first and RJG came in second, and Vortex came in 3rd. But Vortex was paddling for fun with us so they couldn’t accept the Bronze medals so those were passed on to the 4th place i think (I think by then it wouldn’t have mattered who takes them if it wasn’t in placement anyway).  I was a bit disappointed that Dragonhearts Magnum was in a slow boat (yah yah, ppl will always argue that it’s not the boat blahblah) that we used in the previous heat so they came in 5th. They should’ve been right up there with us, RJG and Vortex fighting for placement. Medal or not, we knew they paddled well yesterday.

All in all, it was a happy ending and I had a good time overall… Sorry, no pictures this time.