I am a dragon boat racer! But not the serious kind. Although I do I have a 2nd place medal to show for it so maybe I should get serious. There is an annual dragon boat racing competition every year and a friend randomly got asked to provide a team for a sponsor who was willing to pay all the fees and provide shirts. So that's how I got to be on a dragon boat on Lake Union with a bunch of inexperienced rowers. I knew about half the ladies and we had as much fun hanging out together between races as we did rowing together.
The guy on the front row, bottom left was our coach. We failed terribly in our first race but he didn't give up on us and we did some fake rowing for practice. It must have helped because we beat some of the other teams that had men on them, which is a serious advantage.
Here we are in the waiting tent chanting "Annihilate!" to strike fear in the hearts of our opponents. We were laughing too hard for anyone to take us seriously though.
The winners got to walk through the tunnel of paddlers. Seeing how serious people took this event made it all the more fun/funnier to us. I'm on the right, third person back, in the brown LA hat and loving every minute of it. FYI, one boat capsized and all the swimmers had to be rescued by a nearby pontoon boat. How embarrassing for them. We the fact that we all stayed in the tipsy boat for three races felt like a win too.
