Mist...

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.

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.

Snake Eyes Watching You...

I thought seventeen was bad, but the next week...

Fourteen! What le coq! Pardon my French.

My mind was filled with many a thought along the lines of: "Where is everyone these days? Where on earth have they gone? Not to dragon boating, that's for bloody sure!" Rach was one of those missing but she wasn't very well, so that was a fair reason to miss out. And I bet everyone else had a good reason too, but we only had fourteen! As a team we were all such eager beavers at the start too, the very first practice session of the season we even had a spare paddler. We sat lower in the water back in those days too, although that just made getting the paddle out of the water harder.

Fourteen! That's the number of paddlers we had for practice on the 10th of February. Fourteen! Seventeen was bad, but fourteen! I'm not sure how many paddlers you can go out with but fourteen seems like it should be the minimum to me. Of course, the boat was somewhat spacious with six missing crew, which gave me plenty of room to slide around in. Sorry, I got carried away there, I just can't stop going on about it... Fourteen!
Heading out of the lagoon (with only FOURTEEN paddlers) we went left, as usual, towards the start line but instead of ending there Hayden turned us around and took us back across to the other side of the harbour again. Obviously he considered this was a good time to warm up with a double traverse of the harbour, our previous best distance being one traverse. Zoiks. It wasn't easy but I astonished myself by being able to manage it, even at the slow pace we took up to carry it out with. I wonder if it was this dawdling that inspired Hayden to turn us around and keep going, rather than our usual "stop, ponder, go" regime. I expect the distance we did was something like three quarters of a kilometer and I think I was probably on the edge of my endurance. One of the other sweeps once told me that, when he was paddling, they used to go around the fountain and back for their warm up, which I think must be somewhere between 2 and 3 kilometres. I couldn't be more thankful that I didn't have to do the round the fountain race.
Whatever the motivation for the extra distance, Hayden's hope was clearly to toughen us up for race day and with only a few more practices left I guess every minute of our precious hour long session really did count. To help get our race spirits going we cruised up alongside another boat, full of competitive looking schoolkids and Hayden challenged them to a race. What? No! Racing! That's madness. I have little idea how the race went but we lost, although not by too much. That was no shock at all but, in a rare moment of weakness, Hayden told us we did well for a bunch of unfit old folk of reduced numbers - I think the actual quote was "You did well against them, you really did, they were younger and fitter." I was so taken aback that I think I might actually have said "thank you" out loud.

The following Saturday was our super gambleathon casino night. Each of us had been charged with flogging 5 tickets at a cost of $25 each, nearly all of us failed. Personally, I thought I had a really good chance of shifting them in a workplace of 100 guys but the fact that it landed on Saturday the 13th of February may have been an issue: "Come on love, I've got some tickets for a posh doo, get your best togs on and let's go play poker." Actually, that doesn't sound too bad to me, but I guess it was a tricky sell on the home front. However, we had some good friends cave in to our ticket peddling so, including the tickets we sold to ourselves, we shifted 60% of our allotment. Even telling people at work that we needed the money to buy paddles, which was true, didn't raise the sympathy bar, although the idea of us competing sans paddles did raise a smile or two. Bastards.

With four unsold tickets I had to pop down to the Four Kings to turn the tickets in for door sales. Walking into the pub I stuck with my previous week's form and completely failed to recognise (less bad) Clare outside of training. Actually, that's not 100% true, I thought it was her but I looked over and, she claims, she looked back and smiled. I contest this version of events m'lord. For sure, I looked over, and for sure she reacted but I say her face was more one of "who's this pervert looking at me?" Luckily, as I went sailing past, trying to be nonchalant in the face of the strange look LBC (I have no idea of the origins of the nickname) had cast in my direction I was called back by both her and Captain Claire. As I was already in for a feeling foolish penny it soon became obvious that there was a feeling foolish pound that I had been put in for too. I rue the moment I said "I don't have to go for half an hour." A tutu was produced from a bag, as was a long, flowing blonde wig, and some Dragon Flys deely-boppers, which I had to put on. I was then sent forth onto the streets of Wellington to hand out fliers for our evening of gambling, in the hope of generating door sales for our bulging stack of spare tickets. I'm not convinced that the wig and tutu combo was really the right message to be sending out. People looked at me rather strangely and as soon as they did I would swoop on them to stuff a flier in their mitts. As an illustration of how this costume may have been slightly off topic, one of the people I bumped into was Lorna, one of our own team and I couldn't convince her to come.

All the time I was doing this I was fairly confident that Claire, Clare, Jenna and Siobhan were probably having a lot more success than me at drumming up genuine business, rather than simply being an "I got this flier off a bespeckled boy in a wig and tutu" tale to tell down the pub (one without a casino night, I presume) later.

After picking up Rach and Ronel and returning to the pub I was pressed, once again, into walking the streets but this time I was not alone, as I was in the company of Claire, Clare and Siobhan, who, it turns out, possibly weren't any luckier than me. As a pack we had one success, where Siobhan collared a guy, got him interested then pretty much pushed him down the steps to the gambling. I'm not sure if he stayed or not.

Down in the gambling den however, things were pretty interesting. For the cost of a ticket we got a bunch of chips and a drink. Pint in hand I set out to find what I could lose my chips on: There was one roulette table, with a wheel of such incredible miniatureness it was hard to see where the ball was landing. There was also two blackjack tables, which were fairly popular, and two poker tables, one of which looked very serious (not a wise option for me) and one of which looked more inviting. In the middle of the room stood a craps table. I rejected the blackjack because there weren't any seats and the poker because I get lost in the betting. This left me to wander over to the craps table, where the croupier was trying to explain the game to one lone potential punter. Me and the other punter stood there for minutes trying to get a handle on the rules. Eventually the croupier gave the other punter a chip to place an opening bet so he would roll the dice and we could learn on the job, as it were. Once we were playing it became much easier to pick up and a crowd started to appear, including our good friends Pete, Gareth and Dorit. Gareth and Dorit had a little blast on the craps but were soon drawn away by blackjack. Me and Pete though, well, we were kinda welded to that table all night. I had great luck as a roller and my games went on for ages, although there was still plenty of opportunity for losing chips - one guy lost over 8,000 on one of my rolls. At ten dollars for 10,000 worth of chips that's a bit over a pint's worth! Heady bets for sure.

But why care how many chips you have left? Well, there were ten prizes that night, each in a sealed envelope. The ten players with the biggest haul at the end of the night got to choose an envelope each. Of the prizes on offer the best were the three cash prizes, two of 100 dollars and one of 200 dollars. Of the ten top gamblers three were Dragon Flys. Can you guess where this is going? All three cash prizes went to the Dragon Flys contenders! What are the chances of that happening?

However, the evening wasn't an unmitigated success, because it cost money to put it on and we pretty much sold enough tickets to cover the cost of running it, perhaps even a slight loss. Claire may have known on the night, but she didn't tell. As Lemmy once sang "Seven or eleven, snakes eyes watching you!" Yes, it would appear that snake eyes were watching us, on the first roll, which is a bad thing. But on the plus side I now understand what this means, rather than assuming it to be a reptile infested convenience store, so it was all win for me.

I wonder if Claire was like Vince Vaughn in Dodgeball and put all our money on us to win the dragon boat festival. I hope not.

I Know You From Somewhere...

After the faulty toaster like shock of the fun day we were back in the boat again within a few days.

Hayden was quick to tell us that we could have done better. Well done, here, have a shiny shilling you eagle eyed Baker Street Irregular. Of course, no one disagreed, especially not those that didn't turn up for practice. No matter, we were a happy crew of 17, which required a bit of jigging around to balance the boat. Rach was put one row forward of her normal spot; this meant she got to kneel for the first time (the back row being too narrow to facilitate such a stance) so she got to use her knee pad for the first time (I hate to think how much kneeling would grind me down without a good thick volleyball kneepad on) and smash her shin of the seat in front (which seems to be the expert technique). Dave and myself (normally in row 7) swapped with Robin and Kent, so me and Rach were in consecutive rows for the first time - she got told off fairly quickly for touching me on the back "Any more of that and I'll separate you two!" said Hayden, even though he put us that close in the first place. I expect he was half joking, but he has the oral equivelent of a poker face, so I will never know.

Being shoved back in the boat had a big benefit for me: Robin sits a long way foward, which, as I have mentioned, creates high tension (fear) if he's behind you. I too like to sit quite far forward, which might just be an attempt to run away form Robin, and this hasn't always keyed in with the person in front of me, resulting in the odd bit of impromptue back stroking. But with Rob in the seat in front I had plenty of space to reach forward under his outside arm when plunging my paddle into the water. More importantly, Rob wears nice soft diving boots and keeps his kneeling leg away from the side of the boat, which allowed me my most solid resting position yet for my forward foot. Better still, the tight squeeze between Rob's foot and the side of the boat meant my foot was going nowhere, and neither was the rest of me. I felt a little stretched but, for the first time on the right hand side of the boat, I felt genuinely locked in.

Going full out for a race length (which is just short of infinity, it seems) I got to really focus on my paddling, rather than how much I was slipping around the boat, which was awesome. However, I'd just like to make it clear that my poorness at locking in against the side of the boat is not the reason for my previous failings, indeed it might simply be a symptom of my general failness. To illustrate: Even though I was locked in, towards the end of one of our practice race lengths (actually, quite a long way from the end but I'm sure it was past halfway) I ended up panting like a chain smoking beagle after a trip through duty free and a vigorous walk to the terminal exit. I was gasping hard. I must have sounded bad because Robin leant back and Rach leant forward, both worried I was going to fall out of the boat, or need resucitating, or both. Lock or no lock dragon boating never gets easier but, even with the hyperventilation, this was the first session where I didn't collapse before we were told we were allowed too. I was pretty pleased with this, as we did some hard work and the stupid third finger on my right hand was murder.

After every training session the team goes to the pub, in fact they go to the pub that sponsors us, the Four Kings. However, things generally don't line up for me and Rach and we have to scurry off for some reason or other. Despite this, bumping into team mates seemed to be the thing for days after February's first outing. First I was looking at salad in the supermarket when I heard a "Hello" behind me. That's a familiar voice, I thought, so I turned around but I couldn't see anyone I knew. I must have had a rather blank look on my face... for a while... it seemed liked several... seconds... passed... Then I realised Siobhan was in front of me. She probably did a little wave and said hello again to draw my attention. This might sound pretty stupid of me but she was in disguise: She was wearing normal clothes, her hair was down and she wasn't carrying a paddle. It was an impressive transformation, worthy of the Saint. Then we bumped into Siobhan again, plus Captain Claire and Lorna (the only new starter who doesn't seem to get told off) at Wellington's One Love music festival, we knew they would be there but we didn't actually expect to see them. According to Claire we "look so different outside of training", which made me think the same as Siobhan when I didn't recognise her: God, I must look rough when I'm dragon boating!

Finally we bumped into Lucy, although we didn't know her name was Lucy until after we all broke down in a big old mutual 'I have no idea what your name is' group apology. We were all mighty relieved to be in the same camp and Rach and Lucy ended up showing each other their boating bruises - Rach had a wicked one on her right side, caused by hitting the gunwale as she reaches forward with each stroke and Lucy had one on each arm, from playing the 'six inch punch game' with Robin! It was like a really tame, not shark related version of the scene in Jaws where Quint and Hooper are comparing scars.

I mulled over my own war wounds and took the Chief Brody part.

Define Fun...

Last week's training went better than the double effort the week before, in fact it was a very gentle session. I think this was mostly down to the fact that Hayden was teaching a new sweeper (the person who holds the steering oar at the back) in our boat, so more attention was paid to them. I certainly improved but managed to strain the third finger of my right hand. I think I must have some congenital weakness in there because that finger used to go all strange (like didn't work) with a few hours of mountain biking. I still stopped a couple of times but Hayden did shout "good recovery Jon!" at one point when I'd slipped around the boat, was completely out of position and stopped to adjust but got my paddle back in time with the rest pretty quickly. If you do stop, getting it back into the water is tricky at best. Of course, what he really meant was "thanks for not stopping for too long!"

Then, on Sunday, it was the "fun day". I was convinced it was going to be cancelled, it was seriously windy overnight and when I was chucking stuff in the car it started to rain. But no text came from Claire (the team captain) saying it was off so we headed into town. And it was still on! On a drizzling Sunday morning we amassed, trying to find places to shelter and not get wet - funny considering the inevitable splashing. But the water in the southern end of the harbour was indeed calm - the southerly wind not having enough time or distance from shore to gouge it up into waves.

We were in the first race, at nine o'clock and although we didn't help carry the boats out of the shed we did, somehow, end up being the only team that held the boats on the slipway, stopping them all smashing into each other. That was a pretty good warm up in itself, as the wind really could get a good grip on them.

Then we were out into the water.

The drizzle meant we were wet long before we ended the paddle out to the start line.

Out in the harbour the wind made lining up even trickier and those of us that hadn't paddled in a race before discovered just how manic it can be. After paddling around for ages the officials all of a sudden adjudged we had a line and we were off. A bunch of us were taken by surprise and the start was poor. Then we went hard at a pace beyond anything we'd done before. In no time my arms were destroyed by bad technique. How far was it going to be? How long could I last? Then the end. I thought training was tough but this was much harder.

We were beaten by the army, which was inevitable considering they had carbon fibre paddles coupled with huge upper bodies. But we did beat a boat of schoolgirls.

Soaked and cold we scurried off to the just large enough tent that the organisers had provided. Then we got to stand around for quite some time, getting colder. We'd taken along quite a bit of food but I ended up eating a solitary banana. I'd found it hard and thought that the weather didn't really convey much sense of it being a 'fun day' but I was certainly a lot closer to joy on the happiness scale than many members of the team. When I asked Siobhan (another new recruit) how she'd found it she stated simply that she "hated it". She'd hated every second in fact and couldn't wait to get out of the boat. Lots of people were understandably trodden down by the combination of the wet and the cold - the southerly wind cutting through soaking cloth was particularly cooling.

In the shelter of the tent and wearing extra layers it wasn't too bad though, not compared to standing outside waiting to get in a boat. There was no other option but to jump around to keep warm, I felt like I ran on the spot for minutes on end. Finally in a boat we had a new sweep, Hayden being busy with another boat.

The plan for this race was for a slower pace with more power in the strokes. With the veterans confident that it was the way of the team to have a terrible first race I felt confident that this was going to be a good one. In all honesty, I can't remember anything about the race other than the fact that I looked up close to the end, feeling I'd put in a better performance and found that two boats had already bloody finished. I was crushed. We blamed the different sweep, knowing full well that it wasn't.

More wetness and more coldness preceded our race, specifically sitting in a boat in the lagoon waiting for a sweep, but we kept our spirits up by telling crap jokes, each receiving manic laughter. Eventually Hayden arrived in another boat and hopped over into ours. We were the last to the starting line but hopefully made some kind of amends by getting into position in double fast time. Then away, in what was surely a better start. I was going well, keeping good time but fatigue set in hard and I had to rally myself by growling an uncharacteristic "come on", not really to anyone but me. I heard the calls for more reach and think I put in deeper strokes. Towards the finish our drop in pace was painfully obvious but we crossed the line first!

Of the other teams the only one I remember is the survivors of cancer. Hey, a win's a win, and it felt good.

Clambering out of the boat the team was clearly elated, so elated in fact that six members were willing to be recruited into another boat who were down on crew and racing straight after.

All that was left was the dreaded "round the fountain" which must be about 3 kilometers in total. Luckily, one of the other teams only had a half full boat so our team decided to combine forces, meaning that half of us didn't have to do it, only stay to offer some support! Naturally, I made sure to get my sick note in. Happy and knackered I went off to get changed and when I came out, even more good news, the round the fountain had been postponed to some other time, presumably because of the weather, so no guilt even.

Oh, but that means I still have to do it... damn...