This was tougher than the races last week. These races were in the harbour. The water is different - the tides have more influence. The races are held up for the Coho, the other ferries, whale-watching and sightseeing boats, and yachts. It is a big festival with 90 teams, which mean 18 races of 5 boats to run the heats. With the traffic delays, it takes about 4 to 5 hours to get through a full set of 18 races. Most of the teams have been practicing and racing for a few years, and there a couple of dozen teams with serious competitive goals.
Saturday was cloudy, with sunny breaks. Sunday morning started overcast, and turned to light rain and showers, and then it became sunny for the afternoon. There was small ebb tide in the morning on Saturday, small floods for the other races. The flood tends to curl from right to left across the race course. As novices, we we seeded in lane 5 along the James Bay shore in the Saturday heats, which was a disadvantage. We finished fifth the first race. We didn't do badly, but in the excitement of the first race, there were cumulative small mistakes. We did better in the second race, pulling out a third place finish, which got us enough points to get into the Pearl event, the best 10 of the bottom 30 teams. We were happy with our silver medal, especially since our times in the Pearl semifinal and final were competitive with times in the Bronze events above us.
Our team worked hard, competed with enthusiasm, overcame adversity, lifted its spirits, supported our friends and mentors in the Club, and applauded our competitors.
Loco Motion had some extroverts and natural clowns, who took the Loco name as a mission statement to have fun and create some entertainment. We had funny hats, songs, pranks:
Loco Motion found wonderful support within VCKC. The Club found volunteer coaches and helped us find some experienced dragon and outrigger paddlers to build our team, including Harold. Our coaches Stephen and Judi paddle with the Vasuki Dragons. The Dragons throw money into a pot to shop for buns, bagels, veggies, fruit and snacks, so that the whole team is properly fed, at a ridiculously low cost, through the festival. They brought us in on these arrangements and took us under their wing.
