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Dragon Boat Canada


IDBF


Canoe Kayak Canada

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[Bambi]

Harrison ???????????

[meowzers]

who was the crazy race official whole kept making us race with a BROKEN drum?!
pity the little girl on  the drum. scared ****!?!

[clm10k]

today's festival was a mess.  this is the most chaotic dragonboat event ever.  ive never seen so many frustrated paddlers, protests, and re-races in one festival.   2 hours behind schedule before lunchtime and it just got worse from there.  because of the changes to rules on the fly, no one knew what the hell was going on.  yes, they changed the rules DURING the festival!  you'd ask staff what race you were in and they'd answer, "most likely youre in race number "x" or then again, it can be the race after that...or maybe the one before "x".  we're not sure yet".   it really seemed like they were making rules up as it went along.    also, a couple of the heats clearly had inaccurate times.  heat number 2 for example where a couple of decent teams had a time of around 3:40.  i can go on but i'll leave it as is for now b/c im sure others will add to this.  my intuition says this will be a very long thread.    

[mo]

who was the crazy race official whole kept making us race with a BROKEN drum?!
pity the little girl on  the drum. scared ****!?!

I had the broken drum too in the semi-finals! It was broken from the previous race (they fix it and tied it tightly when we headed out), and on the 3rd stroke on the start, it just let loose and slid forward. I just carried the drum throughout the entire race because I wasn't sure if we'll be DQ if i dropped it and I sure didn't want to make everyone else re-race especially my team since it was our 5th race and I just wanted to get it over with. After we crossed the finish line, i just dropped the drum into the boat (I probably used as much power holding it as paddling during the race hehe!).  Sorry if you guys had it after... 

my record of re-races today... Three! 6 races (2 re-races) with SF; 5 races (1 re-race) with SOAR.

[LittleSchrodinger]

Jeez. How many re-races were there like in total so far? I know my team had done one re race already. It'd be downright awful if every team actually had a re-race. Talk about wearing down on the teams in so many ways.  Beside excessive physical labour and Chinese water torture (Seriously, waiting in the rain wondering what the heck is even going on is no different), did I miss anything else?

Seriously, when did they decide to move the top four rec teams to Comp Consolation and bump everyone else up accordingly? That was like the pinnacle of the mess.

Sadly, the only reason that prevented my team from a medal wasn't even related with the debacle of the festival.

[Swordfish]

Well, it was definitely a long and frustrating day.  It's late and Good Eats is on so I don't want to get too much into it but before we start beating on the event, I do want to say that I know how hard Ian and others have worked to try to run a great event.  So it didn't quite work out....

The site organization itself was great...the racer's village, free water and apples, the big screen, sound system, 3 video feeds, deluxe portable washrooms (while it lasted)...hey, that stuff is awesome.

Problem was the on water stuff...problems and delays in calculating the average times, figuring out which teams go to which semis and finals, pig boats, re-races not due to fault of the paddlers....

It's a shame really because this could easily be one of the premiere paddling events around.  Perhaps they should give the "pros" (i.e. Water's Edge) an opportunity to run the racing aspect of the event and learn from them before trying to do it on their own. 

[sinkingboat]

It was almost comical to see how this festival degenerated down to a gong show. 

Super Puppy to the rescue!

Definitely will not return to Harrison anytime soon.

[paddlecwazy]

In my wildest dreams.. I could not have imagined today.......... and to think I was only worried about a few slow boats.......

[sikamikanico]

They used the slow ass "fraser valley dragon boat club" boat. They shouldn't use that for racing ever again.

[Lethal Weapon]

Jut got home from Harrison and before I crash from my 6 races today (must be some kind of record doing 2 Re-Races back to back...  ) and thought I would share my thoughts on todays events.
I echo Swordfish's comments that there was a lot done by the FVDBC and they went out of there to provide ammenties for the paddlers to make this a great event (all above mentioned perks and visuals (and Yes Ian , the Washrooms were great until the ladies took over.. ) and while this was to be applauded a little more should have been done to insure technical and equipment failures had adequate backups and fail overs in place to prevent some of the problems. True enough Waters Edge are the elite Race Management people (thanks Puppy for helping them out!) and could have prevented most if not all of the issues today but it is just a case of too much of a good thing trying to be crammed into too short a time frame (I think this would be an AWESOME 2 day festival!)
Yes there were some interesting results and Scheduling caused by a combination of over dependance on technology and hard (over worked?) people trying to do too much.
This event is very similar to Nanaimo , small town, great venue, Super people and a hokey kinda small regatta feel (which has now grown up) but the big difference is Nanaimo uses GO (Victoria's race management crew) for the technical part but keeps thier local volunteers to handle the paddlers other needs (Best damn beer garden in BC!)
I agree with Swordfish, Get WE, keep the same local crew with their great Ideas and  make it a 2 day event and u will have a ROCKING event!  (Another bonus is u get the fleet of BUKS with WE, I think another thread on the lack of "Equivilent" 6-16s is coming......)
Nite all and see u in Victoria.....
Don't give up this event folks! If we all stopped going to events because of one bad day or problem then it will be a very short season!

[LittleSchrodinger]

<_< Can we at least burn the slow boats? :O

[Shaggin_Diamond]

It has been a long day for a lot of people and there have most definitely been some frustrations.  I think all the good intentions were there for the festival and thank you to those involved.  Great location, nice to see 50 teams out there and good to see some really exciting races.

However, the timing of races was questionable, the lack of clear communication and the very poor finalizing of the medal and consolation finals really left teams feeling disheartened.  Why would you suddenly move from competing in one division to another between semi finals and finals?  This took over an hour to sort out and the notice board was not correct, nothing was announced over the PA system to let us know what was going on, teams weren't even bothered to stay for the consolation rounds due to over 2 hour delays.  I hope that this will not happen for future festivals as this may prevent or deter teams wanting to come back again.

And on a final note, please leave 'Barney's son' at home, that boat had water leaking into it!

[Siggy]

I've been to the Harrison Festival from the start, and I love the venue, but they absolutely need to sit down and examine what exactly went wrong and figure  out how to fix it. All the volunteers worked hard, and I applaud the effort they put in, but they need to have a long talk about thie year's festival.

Equipment failures leading to re-races? Sucks hard, but not that big a deal compared to the Race Grid problems. That was the show stopper right there, with the moving of teams into different divisions for the Finals?

Moving two teams from the Rec A Final to the Comp A Consolation final? That was just crazy. All because a couple of teams in the Comp A semis had bad races and high race times? That was nuts. Once the divisions are set, you can not move teams in and out of them because of race times.

[Backward Rowing]

Just a really dumb question. Why is there a DBC sanction event (Richmond) on the same days as Harrison?  Couldn't GO Rowing and Paddling Association discuss with Fraser Valley Dragon Boat Assocation to not have conflicting DB Festivals on the same day?

[BernMan]

Does anyone know where the results are posted? I sure would like to see them. And yes the boats sucked big time! After all the complaining in the past about boats you would think they would try to make the boats a bit more comparable. But nooooo!

As for Puppy to the rescue and help out yes he did start off on the right foot with his intentions. Especially when it came to a complaint from one of the womens semi finalists who said their paddles came into contact with another team's paddles. My understanding is the last place team wanted to re-race saying they would have done better than coming in last. As it turned out even if they did come in last their time was faster than the first place team in the other semi so they were in the medal round anyway. By then there were just too many re-races and already too freaking far behind.

Unfortunately Puppy then decided to help the officials handling the race grids for the semis and finals near the end of a very long day. I am not sure if he is the contributor in having some of the comp teams bumped down into rec and having some of the rec teams up to comp. But when it came to placing the proper teams into their proper lanes, that is where he just blew it. I would like to think that Puppy and I are friends going back quite a few years. But Puppy I think you really f***** up on that! In every race that I have been involved in either as a paddler or an official over the years the way it works is the top team is seated in one of the middle lanes followed by the 2nd top team in the other middle lane and then the 3rd top team next to the top team to its right and the 4th top team would be next to the 2nd top team to its left. Basically the top team is in lane 3, the 2nd team in lane 2, the 3rd team in lane 4 and the 4th team in lane 1. That was the way things went and then suddenly it was changed. My crew was the 3rd top team of the day based on times and yet they were placed in lane 1. That lane has already been mentioned in this tread as having the FVDBC slow pig boat. How can a team who is expected to do well do anything with a boat like that no matter how well they paddled? The odds were already stacked up against my crew but they were getting better and better throughout the day and they should have been in lane 4. I know lane 4 came in 2nd in the end and perhaps my crew could have done that too. I am sure Diggerpig may say otherwise but when its time to put out I think you will find my crew did just that. For those who know of my crew they totally impressed me this weekend. They totally exceeded my expectations as a coach and I realized that they deserved to be where they were. In the end Puppy steered for the team in lane 2 which was where they should have been so no problems there. But that team in the past has been quite comparable to my crew and there would have definitely been a much closer race. And chances are my crew could have pulled it off.  Unfortunately though Puppy could have had a bit of a conflict in getting involved with placing teams where they were placed since he was involved in that heat. Could that have been his motivation? I would like to think not.

Anyway I am posting this here because I want those who know me how proud I was of my crew and how real it was for them to be there where they were.

A big congratulations goes out to Eye of the Dragon as I had you pegged as the favourites! Way to goooo!