Gung Haggis Fat Choy dragon boat team at the Lotus Sports Club Bill Alley Memorial Dragon Boat regatta at Barnet Marine Park on May 17th, 2008

It's the final practice before the Rio Tinto Alcan Dragon Boat Festival…

Race schedule will be out anyday now… 
The first race could be anytime on Saturday morning.
the 2nd race is dependant upon where we finish in our first race.
the 3rd race is usually after the Women's and Junior races – so around 10am -11am.
– this is the race that determines top finishers in the finals, otherwise the consolation
The 4th race is in the finals or consolation.

TUESDAY practice is geared for final race preparation….
ALL Alcan rostered paddlers – please attend.
All other paddlers can take out our 2nd dragon boat…. so Ashleigh, Wendy, Leanne, Sean, Andrew and everybody are invited…

SUNDAY FATHER's DAY PRACTICE

We had visits from Steven Wong's father and my father – both named Bill Wong.
Steven
gave an introduction about his father, who was the subject of a CBC
documentary in February called “Tailor Made: Chinatown's Last Tailor”  
Steven's father also paddled on the team “Paddling the Wong Way”.  This
was significant as Bill Wong was in his 80's and paddling with his
younger brothers Maurice and Milton – who was one of the founders of
the Canadian International Dragon Boat Festival Society (also known as
the corporate sponsored Alcan Dragon Boat Festival).

On the
water… we worked the team harder for a warm-up, trying to get out the
Sunday afternoon lazies… and put the team into race mode.  We started
with 1/2 boat starts… front half , then back half.  Wow… the boat
was really pulling!!!   Then a full race boat race piece.  You could
really feel it fly.   

But… timing was mushy on some areas, the fronts complained the backs were rushing, and the backs complained about timing… 

We
worked on some other small group exercises.  We did more front half and
back half starts.  We moved some people around.  And everything started
to fall into place again.

Our final start + transition pieces worked really well.  We can all take pride in what we are accomplishing as a team. 

During a quick debrief… Hillary's answer to everything was “Ice cream!”

Keep up the fun… get to know everybody on the team….
Remember that as hard as we want to paddle, win medals and do our best…
there is always life
after dragon boating…
and it's name is

a) f-u-n
b) f-r-i-e-n-d-s-h-i-p
c) i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m

Cheers, Todd