Dragon Boat Racing!

Yesterday myself and eight other fools, I mean colleagues, took part in the East Anglian Dragon Boat Festival in support of EACH (East Anglian Childrens Hospice.)

I went prepared with three changes of clothes, shorts, shoes etc. and thankfully it was a lovely sunny day, so much so that my face and arms are burnt but my legs remain as lilly white as ever - why does that always happen?

Anyway, the boats are made up of ten rowers and a drummer, with the helmsman provided by the event organisers. As you will see from my opening sentence, we had NINE crew, two short of a full team. The odds were always going to be stacked against us!

Other teams had a full compliment plus ten to twenty reserves that they swapped around throughout races. We had three races to take part in and our two top times were added together to see if we could make the semi-finals.

Well........ race 1 : 104 seconds (the only team to post a time over 100! Woo-hoo!), race 2 : 92 seconds (we learnt our lessons from the first race), race 3 : 103 seconds (ok, we were knackered by this point!)

When I say that the leading teams were circa 63 seconds you can see how poor we were!

But....... every cloud has a silver lining! There were 33 teams racing on the day and we were 33rd! And as a reward for this achievment we have won a day out at Sprowston Manor Hotel to take full use of their social club facilities (gym, sauna etc etc) and a meal chucked in too. The idea is that the losing team can get some training in for next year......

..... or maybe a round of golf, lunch and then a think about it!

It was a great day and over £16,000 was raised for EACH.

If you fancy it, here's the link.