Dragon Boats! June 8th was Dragon Boat day in Hong Kong (and in many other places around Asia) - and for the first time I participated in the Dragon Boat races at Stanley. A friend asked me to be on the Bloomberg team and we started training a couple of months before the Festival. Training mostly consisted of getting into a boat, paddling around off Stanley Main Beach for about two hours and then hitting the pub for "carbo-loading". So I was a bit worried that we weren't getting to the right level of readiness for the races. Fortunately we had a different trainer for the last two weeks and we actually did some competitive work.

Sunday June 8th arrived and I was up at 5.30am to make the team bus in Central. We headed down to Stanley, got a lift to the Bloomberg junk (the biggest in the bay), got changed and headed back to the beach for our first race at 9am. Which was a bit of a disaster - we came 7th out of 12. Back on board the junk the first beers of the day were already being drunk(!), and we held a post-mortem to work out what went wrong. I didn't listen to the post-mortem, and at 11.30am we headed back to the beach for our next race, which was make or break.



At the beach we got into our boat and headed off to the starting line.



I'm wearing the green cap.



We were rowing past the line of linked junks, which were in full party-mode.



After a bit of waiting the marshall fired the starting gun and we were off. We were a little slow off the mark but still in the first five. It felt better this time.



For a while we seemed to be trailing the leaders but we stuck to our plan (which was to go fast, them slow, then fast until the end), and eventually we overhauled the boat to our right.



In the end we came third in that race, which amazingly got us into the Men's Final, in which we came sixth. Not bad!  ¶ 4:13 PM