The big announcement of the post casino night was that our sponsors are swines and we raised bugger all money, which is a bit of a downer when you're shy of a set of paddles - some of the team have paddles from previous dragon boating endeavours and those of us that are oar-less can use the bog standard efforts that live in the boat shed, but there are much better paddles out there and it seems that you are allowed to blame your tools in this sport.
However, to put the paddles problem into perspective there was much more tragic news. The previous day the body of a drowned teenage schoolgirl been recovered from the water but we only found out when Amy told us that the boat of schoolgirls that she skippers didn't want to go out on the water. Who could blame them. Apparently there was no suspicion of foul play, but there seems little consolation in that.
We ourselves had a minute's silence out on the water, as a mark of respect and the weather reflected this sad occasion with a veil of fog across the whole harbour. This created an eerie but serene mood, especially as we sat quietly in the boat, our paddles uncharacteristically still during our uncommon silence. Even during our hard work the mist offered up a strange calmness, which was almost powerful enough to make me forget the exertion when we paddled out, warming up with another double traverse of Lambton Harbour, a place that's now as familiar as any to me, but which seemed completely altered in the haze. Paddling through the water at perhaps our slowest pace ever we could have been in a pirate film, tentatively but doggedly making our way through the water, every sound deadened except the lapping of the water around the boat. There seemed every chance of a ghost ship slipping into view at any time.
However, to put the paddles problem into perspective there was much more tragic news. The previous day the body of a drowned teenage schoolgirl been recovered from the water but we only found out when Amy told us that the boat of schoolgirls that she skippers didn't want to go out on the water. Who could blame them. Apparently there was no suspicion of foul play, but there seems little consolation in that.
We ourselves had a minute's silence out on the water, as a mark of respect and the weather reflected this sad occasion with a veil of fog across the whole harbour. This created an eerie but serene mood, especially as we sat quietly in the boat, our paddles uncharacteristically still during our uncommon silence. Even during our hard work the mist offered up a strange calmness, which was almost powerful enough to make me forget the exertion when we paddled out, warming up with another double traverse of Lambton Harbour, a place that's now as familiar as any to me, but which seemed completely altered in the haze. Paddling through the water at perhaps our slowest pace ever we could have been in a pirate film, tentatively but doggedly making our way through the water, every sound deadened except the lapping of the water around the boat. There seemed every chance of a ghost ship slipping into view at any time.
Of course, we were there to practice, and practice we did, even past breaking point. I can't quite remember the circumstances but we'd been paddling up and down, doing some starts, some race pace lengths too, when we came across another boat. "Who wants to race?" asked Hayden. "Not me," I said, but dragon boating isn't a democracy, so we lined up, readied our paddles and... we were clearly far too knackered to race, and we knew it before we went. We limped along, or at least I did. In fact, I was out of sorts all practice: My back screamed with each twist action, my legs ached, which just makes me grumpy, but worst of all I kept whacking my thumb against the side of the boat. Something was clearly wrong, I have a tendency (through bad technique) to catch the side of the boat anyway and my thumb has been known to clip the side once in a while but these were big hits, smacking my dear digit between gunwale and paddle, sometimes more than once in a length. The impacts were certainly in double figures. I was like my cat, no matter how many times I did this foolish painful thing I didn't seem to learn not to do it. I could have chucked the bloody paddle out of the boat when I did it three times in ten strokes.
Oddly, even though I finished with a really soar thumb, my third finger seemed to be fine - who'd have thought that digits could be so mysterious.
Beautiful setting, sad circumstances and a terrible innings.
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