Dragon Boat West

Does anyone know how many teams will be at Richmond this year?  Just wondering if there are any more than last year, although it was quite fun not having long waits between races!

Has the race grid come out yet?

Thanks

Not that I'm aware of.

Never mind, just came out!

http://www.ubcboathouse.com/documents/2009RipuptheRiverSchedule.pdf

Nice 29-30 teams, with a great party after...enjoy!

Who's "Bring Me My Brown Pants"?

AWESOME name!!!

isn't that the lovechild of swordfish and banana fusion...

manda, did you just toot your own horn for that name? lol  :whistle:

I just threw up a lot...

Think of it as Banana Fusion with a large patch of hair.

Is it bad that I ignored the 'Fusion' part and went straight to 'banana with a large patch of hair'?

I second Swordfish on the throwing up part.

The words Swordfish & lovechild should never be used in the same sentence.....

Great day. Great paddlers. Great venue and beer.

But definitiely not on our schedule for 2010. Anyone have comments on the rest of it?

Agreed. Great venue, great beer. But like you, it is not on our schecule for 2010. Tides, river currents, fast teams getting faster water. The difference between the AM heats and the PM heats is ridiculous and the starts with one person yelling GO! and the finish line with one person checking four boats times and blowing an air horn. Not rowing guys, or outrigger sprints, but dragonboat paddling! No numbers, no lanes, no credibility. Never again...

Madcap: You guys did a great job and have come a long way over the years. Congrats to all the teams who finaled and enjoyed the day. We practice there so we knew that going in (river plus tides) - it certainly is different and adds an exciting challenge for the team as well as to maintaining fairness due to the fluctuating flow. This was our 4th Richmond festival attendance. The conditions add more than enough advantages and disadantages to all the teams, both competitive and novice, to just let everyone race all day and have fun, rather than try to select a top 16 (full disclosure: we were not one of the 16). The tide could have worked the other way, too, and propelled us into a final. Still, we would want to race everyone and expect that finals included everyone.

Kicking myself for not seeing the writing (or grid) on the wall - new this year - that only the top 16 out of the 30 teams would get to do finals - I had "16 mixed teams = 16 teams in finals" in my head. Dummy. So when I clued into reality that we were done for the day, I was surprised. Wasn't expecting eliminations of that sort in a small festival - and had never before in Richmond. The poor Sunshine Coast team who ferried here waited 3 hours to find out their finals fate (not in 16). We just wanted to race again, whether A final (right!) or Z final (more likely).

This is now just hindsight, no sour grapes ... but for next year, just makes more sense to let everyone do 3 races. I'm not an event planner but slightly tighter intervals, 3 additional heats of 4 (even add an additional boat or two) and you're done less than one hour later. Instead, 12 teams ... about 300 people ... were dismissed. Down went tents, attendance, and beer and vendor sales ...

So, shame on me for not noticing it and bringing it up with UBC earlier. Lesson learned. Harrision 2010 instead anyway.

Richmond was all fun for us... but here are my two cents.

The Could-Be-Better:

- Some fast teams got faster due to seeding, and slow teams had a disadvantage for the same reason. True that this is the case for all festivals, but because this is on a river and is such a small festival, could maybe take this into consideration?

- Recycling bins.

- Congestion to get in line for burgers after the races... perhaps the burger stand could be outside of the building?

- After looking at a bunch of teammates' burgers, I wasn't hungry anymore... they looked a bit like hockey pucks.

- Not everyone racing in 3 races. It wasn't very long ago when Banana Fusion was the last of the boats. I'd be horrified if I had to wait hours for the results, and then be told to go home because we didn't qualify. I totally agree with IronGiant on this one.

- 20 minutes between heats? Granted there are only 4 boats to race with, but 20 minutes? and 50 minutes break between sets? The whole festival could've been cut down by hours if it was condensed a little.

- My team went into this festival wanting to have a good time. We were there to win something, but definitely weren't planning to ruin the day for anyone else. I was wearing a retro 80's workout outfit [think Jennifer Beals in Flashdance] for team spirits.

My team and all of the familiar teams from Vancouver were joking with me, laughing and taking photos with me. But right before the Awards Ceremony, LITERALLY while getting ready for the photos, I was "censored" and "strongly suggested" to wear someone else's very ugly XL basketball shorts. Apparently I had "quite a number of complaints", she says.

Why did that person wait until the awards ceremony to censor me? It looked exactly like a one piece bathing suit. So, I'm thinking some people don't have a sense of humor, or that person would go out on a regular basis and report anyone wearing less than a tank top?

Oh well, I kept those shorts.

- One person timing 4 boats.


The Lets-Do-It-Again:

- The medals were pretty, and engraved on the back unlike Alcan's.

- Venue was very pretty. Everyone had a superior view of the entire race course.

- Good draw prizes, I heard.

- Pretty well organized festival for something that isn't run by the dragonboat specialists.



Overall I had a great experience up until the point someone told me to wear someone else's clothes and handed me a pair of random shorts.
Finally, this isn't Richmond Festival organizers' faults, but it was disappointing to overhear some teams smack talk us, that we cheated/stacked etc.

Richmond 2010 is a maybe, verging on a No. :)


Congrats to all the teams who raced today, and hope to see you at Harrison, Kelowna, or Last Gasp!!!

The way the seeding worked for the finals could have been improved significantly. The organizers should have known from the first set of races that tides played a huge part in the way in the times (ie, Eric Hamber getting the fastest time in the first heat). This was the case for the semis where the times got progressively faster and faster as the current got stronger and stronger. It was a little funny how the race organizer insisted that the water was neutral and fair for everyone in the afternoon.

I was on riptide/ready jet go and we won both our first two races by fairly large margins, but because our semi was earlier in the afternoon, we were seeded 8th in the B final. Our time for the B-final was I believe 1.17. The winning time in the A-final was 1.16.

It was fun overall and taking home hardware is always nice, but we were very much looking forward to racing the brown pants team.

The seeding was weird, as some of my team mates and i were looking at placement grid from the racing package and it said "fastest time from semi goes into A finals". i thought that my team would end up in b finals as we came in 2nd in our semi finals but still had the 4th faster time overall.

would of been great to have raced in the finals with ready-jet-go/riptide and bring me my brown pants. we also clocked in at a 1.17 time to get 2nd in A finals. the tide did create fast times, we said that there is no way this is 500m like they said, it felt way shorter. i do believe that most, if not all the ppl that ran this festival are rowers, so they are use to placement based on time alone. atleast this year the turn out was pretty good (29 teams i think, better than last year), just wished that every team had the chance to have raced all 3 races. also some teams that came in 2nd/3rd in B finals and lower were all waiting to get metals at the docks only to be told that only 1st place and A finalist gets metals, which was a shame. hopefully things will be better new year and teams will come back to it. we need festival like this to survive as we need more local festivals, god knows if taiwanese is ever coming back.

overall i enjoyed the festival, did not have the burgers as it did not look appetizing, but did bump into some of the brown pants at the cafe accross the street from the festival during lunch. and amanda, you looked fantastic in ur swimsuit thing, just wished our own coach would stop wearing tights to our training...

Junior teams had a great showing ... you folks always push us to paddle harder, usually because we're behind you. Great enthusiasm. Manda, I saw the Flashdance outfit, no big deal - super spirit, don't back down. Shorts would have thrown off the whole silhouette. Do you have it in men's XL for Kelowna for me!? Did I just use my outside voice ...

Richmond 2010: Water's Edge books the Ozone, the new huge park/plaza in front of speed skating oval, where the river is twice as wide, and run races ACROSS the river. That removes tidal issues. Water's Edge removes race issues. At 250m, Dash for Charity accomodates 48 teams in one day, 3 races. (We had a company fuction out there a couple of weeks ago ... beer as well ... so it's possible ... huge space. Paddling Centre on the first floor, too - tanks and all.

Well, not only did your name not make sense, but you were also prancing around baring your moose knuckles for everyone to see. AND you stacked your team with banana and fish paddlers. So who wouldn't be offended?   :snooty:

the team that i heard talk poorly of other teams (you weren't the only ones) are the same teams that practice on the same weekday as us and they're generally a good bunch.  Disappointment, long day under the sun, and other reasons could be factors to the grumpybear-mouths-off syndrome.  Don't let a few bad mouths ruin the reputation of a team for you, manda. 

There are always active ears (intentionally or unintentionally) listening at festivals and news in the dboat community travel like wildfire.  so that's why i keep conversations about weekends with thai ladyboys to a minimum at festivals...

IronGiant- now that the festival is over, is there a clearance price on the bumper stickers? j/k... thanks, ritchie bros, for the use of their parking lot!

Interesting conversations going on here. Too bad I was not involved in any way, shape or form to truly appreciate the legitimate complaints. But 'mo' was right when she said not to worry about who said what about a crew. It is obvious that it was not an original crew. It was more of a couple of crews putting their share together to form a team. This is possibly because neither team could field enough paddlers to fill a boat. Does that mean they are cheating? NO! Not in my opinion anyway. They even made up a new team name. Had they kept the name of one team then maybe I can see how someone could be a bit disappointed because maybe they are trying to keep up or beat a team that they compare themselves to. I know I was involved in a nice close race last year with a team that we historically had better times/better placements all season long only to lose to them by a mere .02 of a second, that's 2 1/100ths of a second in our last final race of the season!  8))  Didn't matter though because it was good for my crew to know that they kept their original crew in tact and still managed to almost keep the status quo. It was still a good way to end the season. Anyway good on the mishmash of 2 teams put together to show that together they can come up with a nice race plan and accomplish what they set out to do!

That is true. The race was actually 425m!



I agree that the seeding could use a lot of improvement. My entire team was stunned when we heard Ready Jet Riptide was in B finals, instead of A finals. The tides were always changing, there's no way the staff crew could claim it was neutral!



Do you mean Kevin or Sean? Cuz I know I've seen more than enough of Sean's manly body parts  :x



Here is the reason for Brown Pants [in case anyone didn't get it  :)]:

http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/95q2/pants.html

to be fair, eric hamber is a fast jr team, on multiple occasions they have beaten the laoyam eagles which is like the best jr team in bc. and those eagles are damn fast, beating adult teams!


neither of them are our coaches, dave, the strath youth dragons know whom i'm talking about. no man should ever have to see another man do dynamic stretches in tights :|

and mo, you had lunch with the sword fish crew, couldn't you have slipped them some laxatives before our finals?

Whoops I thought you were from Ready Jet Riptide.

and we don't need any more browning of the pants! :shock:

A little off topic on my part, but I've never seen an Alcan medal that was not engraved. All the medals I have or have seen have been engraved.

your first place medals were eye blinding, they were like extra polished or something. last years 1st place medal were just like the b finals gold medals, nothing special. only thing that made richmond sweet last year was the fact that they gave our team a free buffet dinner at the river rock. sushi in the chocolate fountain and alaskan king crab legs mmmm... how was the prize for coming in first this year compared?

and our team did not win a medal this year at alcan so i can't say how the medals were this year.

From the sound of it, looks like the seeding definitely was a major issue. I guess that's why it has always been a relatively small festivals. Hopefully someone will let the organizers know how to seed properly. :|

What! the Gold I got at Alcan had a sticker on the back with the division and placement.  :?



We got a $150 gift cert to Boston Pizza. Lol. River Rock sounds fantastic  :shock: wow.

Our mish-mash team entered Richmond with the mindset that it would be a small event.  Sheepishly I can say that my team was a beneficiary of a late semi-final.  However, it was nice to see our team nearly pull a 3rd or even 2nd out of the A Final.  I'm not going to argue that our team deserved to be there more than others but we showed we could be competitive in that race.  I totally agree though that the timing system is dumb in almost any tidal waters.

My major problem with the regatta was that we were always in Lane 4, farthest away from the starter.  It was nearly impossible for us to hear him in a couple of the races.  They should have moved the air horn to the starter and told the steers where they could stop.  With the amount of time it was taking between races I'm sure that the boats taking a couple extra of seconds to reach the dock wouldn't have killed anybody.

It's really too bad that a number of teams only got 2 races.  They could have easily fit another final or 2 in.  Just think.  If your team had spares and you didn't make a semi then you have paddlers with only 1 race.  Not good.

That said, we had a blast and will probably return next year.  There needs to be the smaller festivals where the minnow rec teams can do well and have some fun.

Oh and Manda, you keep dressing whatever way you want!  If you got it, flaunt it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac9OTTiT_fM

Just some comments, mainly repeats of what others have said:

- advancements have to be based on placement, not time (unless as tie breaker the way its done at Alcan). We experienced close to 50 seconds between our first race and our last.  Teams can get screwed depending what time they race and at least one clearly did.

- didn't know about the only 2 races for some teams issue.  That's *not* good, I'd be super p***ed and would swear off coming back for that reason alone.

- no airhorn at the start = fail.  Although having one at the finish was nice so we knew when to slack off.   :dance:  Seriously though, get an airhorn for the start even if it's to spare the race marshal's vocal cords.

- not a necessity but a PA system down the bank would've been nice.

I was at the Richmond festival the first year and I think it might be another couple of years before I'll do it again.

Ok now I am curious. Anyone have pictures of Manda and anyone else?  :x

I have to ask:

1) Why would anyone want to have Delta Vancouver Airport Hotel catering services? I believe the only choice were $5 burgers or $5 veggie burgers. It just seems to me as overpriced hamburgers. I would have been happier with UBC catering services during the regatta.

2) Since this was a GO Rowing and Padddling event, was there really no race officials with dragon boat regatta experience? In the past, did they not use placement? Also, with the horns, why not use a starter horn and eliminate the  4 finishing horns? No every boat could hear the start, and the finish horns did not serve a purpose (unless the steersperson really is unable where the finish line is).

3) Why not have the beer garden outdoors?  Although out in the elements, it sure was a lot more fun having teams get together. In the clubhouse, it is crowded and the atmosphere very stifled.

Comment on tides:
Here is the tide table for Sand Heads
9am   10am 11am 12pm 1pm   2pm  3pm   4pm   5pm
0.7      0.7      0.9      1.5      2.1      2.8      3.5      3.9      4.2
From this alone, if times were used, the first 4 heats were at a disadvantage.

You asked for it, and man... will you be sorry... :lol:
(http://i28.tinypic.com/2pre1xe.jpg)

http://tinypic.com/r/2pre1xe/3 I am on the left. My co-coach is on the right.

Never underestimate the power of $3 at Value Village.

AWESOME! Ahhhh to remember the 80's eh? Thanks for posting!  msn(:d)

get to work bernman :lol:

Is it 11:30 yet? Uhhhh nooooooooo it ain't!  :lol:

i look on go's site - http://www.gorowandpaddle.org/events/richmond_festival.php (http://www.gorowandpaddle.org/events/richmond_festival.php). i don't believe this is a go rowing and paddling event (since '06 or 07). it is run by the ubc boathouse and they use go rowing and paddling's millennium boats.

looking forward to the seniors games dragon boat in richmond in september!

After all is said and done, I hope that the Rankings will not be affected by such a regatta. It would be a shame for teams who entered this festival to be penalized for their participation. 

Hi Pat; notwithstanding my earlier comment, I hope this is included in rankings. The formulae seems to work, and it adds to the flavour. Plus without wildcard results how can our xxx pool be exciting without it. Thank you BlueSteak to inversing my universe from 649, 21, NHL to westcoast dragon boating!

i have no clue what you are talking about towards the end off ur paragraph backwards. the festival was fun, the ranking means nothing to most ppl including me. as a higher ranked team doesn't always mean that they are a better team than a lower ranked one or that they will always beat that lower ranked team. i doubt it will even be included towards total points as some teams were merged teams and i don't know how they would split it. even if it does, it wouldn't move any teams up any spot as the ranking on this board only moves up a team if that team beats a previous team that they had lost to. anyways, harrison is coming up and hope to see u all there.

Super Exposed pic of the A final Bronze, Silver and Gold winners
(http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/6817/18072009251.th.jpg) (http://img268.imageshack.us/i/18072009251.jpg/)

ouch...well, at least your picture doesn't hurt my eyes as much as manda's...

Normally exposed photo of the same thing.

(http://i29.tinypic.com/6roe9x.jpg)

Well we were 2nd in our 1st race at 9:20 am, 1st in our semi and ended up 4th in the A final. We were in the 4th lane and didn't hear the start call too well so a horn would have been nice and it would have made for a tighter finish. Maybe the jet go /rip tide should have been there instead, but luck of the draw, eh. Having a medal from the B final would have been nice.

Using results from regattas such as this can skew the Dragonboatwest rankings a little, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it.  

The rankings here are a fun way to see how one team potentially stacks up against another.  Just remember that a team will only move up the rankings if they beat a higher ranked team head-to-head.  I'm sure their is some concern that teams that ended up in a higher division will move up the rankings unnecessarily.  If they got to race in a higher final by virtue of a tide assisted time and didn't actually beat a higher ranked team in the process then they shouldn't move up.

Having said all that, if some weird movements in the rankings do occur (mostly caused by merged teams that use one of the orignal teams names), then their is always the potential for the initial seeding at future regattas to be affected.... for example, without a Club Crew type process of tracking and vetting crew lists, organisers of future regattas would have to assume that Team "A" with a good performance had improved and should now be seeded higher, when in fact their improved performance was the result of 8-10 borrowed paddlers from higher ranked teams.

Couldn't hear the start in lane 3 either, definitely bringing a spare air horn next year as I remember it being a problem last year too!

If Richmond Regatta is included in the ladder rankings, it might potentially skew it a little bit.

However, do keep in mind that the results will pretty much correct itself over the next few regattas/festivals as more data (not affected by crazy tide fluctuations/improper placements) about a team's capability comes in.  :wink:

Has the Richmond results come out yet?.... or am I blind and can't find it on their website?

I just found it on their site...
http://www.ubcboathouse.com/documents/Finalracegridwithresults.xls

I *swear* that wasn't there yesterday... Maybe I should have checked it again this morning before posting? :P

I believe you, I'd given up checking! 

Try this link: http://www.ubcboathouse.com/dragonboat.html (http://www.ubcboathouse.com/dragonboat.html)

There seems to be a typo in the first heat of richmond results where Team Momentum is listed twice. By process of elimination, I'm guessing one of them is Bring Me My Brown Pants. Anyone know which is which?

Answer: neither.  They messed up on the labelling.  Here's a link to the race grid: http://www.ubcboathouse.com/documents/2009RDBFGridFINAL_000.pdf.  They don't have Brown Pants or the Auctionauts at all in the morning races and they had Blazing Paddles right after each other.

We (Ritchie Bros.) were in the first heat, lane 2 (3rd place) ... moved on to ninth heat, lane 2 (2nd place) ... then we were sent home. Brown Pants were heat 4, lane 2 (1st place) and moved on to heat 14, lane 3 (1st place), then to gold in A. Me thinks the aerodynamic uniforms provided an advantage ... hmmmm ...

It's all about strategy.  :) watch and learn.... hahaha

Thanks for the clarification Swordfish & IronGiant

They could watch, but shouldn't learn it. It's not going to be a pretty sight if it starts to be copied lol