REGATTA 4: SATURDAY 14 JANUARY 2023
The New Year certainly started with a bang! Christmas Holidays? “So last year” and it was time to work off all that excess! The Club focus has now firmly switched to the Australian Nationals, with warm up races at Sydney Lunar, Bei Loon, potentially New Zealand and then it is on – strap in everybody!
Fabulous weather, which was a nice change, capsizes, lots of other clubs, fierce rivalry and racing, one our boats went walkabout in the 2 Km, Laura making a guest appearance from UK back with the Club and lovely to see her, Sonia supporting us in true style with her injuries and a warm welcome to our latest recruit Ben the Kiwi who was certainly thrown in at the deep end – welcome aboard! This culminated in a great BBQ and a heap of fun! Where do your roving reporters start?!
The day started early as we were the Regatta set up and pack down crew to set the day up for the racing – dressing the boats, tentage, signage etc. How many Komodo’s does it take to put up a tent? It depends how many times it has to move. While all this was going on, Thea and Kim were sorting out the Racing Configs and the results of the day showed how successful they were – great achievements all round. We had a very strong turnout and had three full 20s boats racing which brought additional challenges as we had been training with smaller crews.
What’s a warm-up without a little disco music to get everyone moving? With Coops pumping the tunes during his usual funky moves, everyone was in tip-top Phase Blue shape. Bonza motivation speeches by our Captain, President, and coaching teams.
The Racing was great – everyone was pitched in to starting the day with 2 Km racing back-to-back which certainly got rid of the Christmas Blues – “why did we eat so much and do so little exercise” we muttered! And then it was a blur of 200m races followed with some very sharp turnrounds at times – flexibility was key! Also, some valuable lessons about “removing the rock” noted for future training.
Noting some of the brilliant results which really puts paid to all our hard work and training: Komodo Opens in the 2km started from being the last boat to cross the start line to becoming the first to cross the finish. The resulting 10m51s time was a full 80 seconds faster than the second boat. Thinking of every 500m stretch as four separate races really works!
In the Mixed 20s 2km, it was Komodo Blue up against Komodo White. With Adz and Aditya sweeping beautifully, both boats romped home to 1st and 2nd
It was a while since we had seen a capsize, but it was handled well, no injuries and there was certainly some fun in the “chaos corners” of the various 2 Km races as calls, bogus shouts of “right of way” by the other sweeps who seemed to focus on the Komodo boats and clashes were handled (by Komodo anyway) very well.
The capsize was an interesting sideshow – it was at the end of a race and seemed to be in slow motion as they did a stately dance and flopped into the water. The recovery was speedy and meant they were all floating around and holding the boat with only their heads showing as if they were on the start line – but the boat was underwater!
We also had the pleasure of welcoming the DeafACT to Dragon Boat Racing and take us through our paces with Dragon Boat signing which included new Dragon Boat signs as some of the commands are not in the signing vocabulary – a very warm welcome to them and a big thanks to O’B for helping to set it all up.
A cracking day down at Grevillea and many thanks to our coaches for setting us up for success. A couple of the clubs ran us a bit closer than we thought giving the coaches plenty to consider – as we found out the next day at training! No mercy in our quest for world domination ……………..