Ideally I would like to have a full boat at the beginning of the season, whenever that is since you don't need to worry about people playing catchup. Of course repeating things for the rest of the boat wouldn't be all that bad since you would be reinterating what they should already know as important. But you can only repeat so much...
Realistically, most of the technique to get the boat moving could be picked up with relative ease in about 4-5 practices... think about it... catch, pull through, exit, recovery. It's not that hard to get the basics. If you're asking about having the paddler refine their stroke to have perfect technique with rotation, stroke length, pause, leg-drive, top arm drive and all that.. then it could take months if not years...
I think some of the elite dragonboat teams from years gone by used to grab paddlers together for 2-3 pracitices right before the Festival. But these paddlers would be already actively paddling in other watersports.
What? Only 1 year experience? Gee...they must put them through practices from hell, before they are up to par with the rest of the crew!
Experience matters!
It's not really the number of years of paddling people do that should matter, rather it's their drive to improve the quality of their paddling. No offense to anyone out there, but I would take a person that knew nothing about paddling but willing to come out to every practice as well as putting in some extra on the marathons or even OC's, than someone that's been on a Rec D team for the past 10 years...
