Provident Pilgrims: In Tight Sync

The races this weekend were awesome. The weather was great, and the Dirty Oars are a fun-loving group.

It looks like this from the shore, as the big boats get lined up.

There are 19 people in each boat - 16 rowers, a captain (steering with a big rudder oar), a drummer (to keep the rowing rhythm), and a flag catcher (who grabs a flag from a pole in the water at about the 75% mark of each race).

If you're a good team, all your paddling is in tight sync. (Click the pics to zoom in if you like, and if you do, you can see in the pic below that somehow the leading team's flag is in the water.)

Our first race was at 9:30ish. We finished in 1min 43secs, but we were missing four of our rowers. At about noon, we won a race by 1/10th of a second - with a full boat and a time of 1:29. That earned us a spot in the best heat in the final race.

We were psyched, but we got burned by two teams that do dragonboating pretty seriously... traveling to Montreal and Beijing and other places for races. Who knew? We earned a time of 1:25 (I think) in that race, but we still came in a distant third. The best time of the day was a surprise... 1:16 by a group of high school boys who were in a less competitive final heat. They were pumped.

I'm not exactly sure how it worked, but we won a $500 check as the best "support" team. We can donate the check to our charity of choice. The whole event was benefitting breast cancer awareness and research, so probably our captain will direct our funding there.

There was also traditional dancing going on...

...and tea eggs were on sale...

...and the winner of the dumpling eating contest ate 35 dumplings in five minutes. Craziness.

The organizers also tried to fly the biggest kite in North America, made by a Taiwanese kite master. Unfortunately, it wasn't windy enough.

The local hashers group (folks that run and drink together, yes, sometimes simultaneously: Hash House Harriers on Wikipedia.) came with their whole team connected by chain in purposefully ragged clothes. Their captain had a full-on leather whip and electrical tape coiling up his calves like old-style sandals.