Just back from the Las Vegas Dragon Boat Festival. And here's a quick summary of my impressions:
- Nice location
- Good competition
- Organizers need to get the paddle out of their ...
The Lake Las Vegas resort is a beatiful location and racing was fine on the lake. It's a small venue so I can't see the festival getting above 25 teams without having to find a new location for the paddler's village.
There were some really good teams at the event from LA, Arizona, and the northwest states, plus VanCity Thunder and ourselves (TD Lightning) from Vancouver, so competition was good. Some of the teams there were absolute beginners with only one or two practices before the races, but the divisions were set up pretty well to avoid having a novice team killed by a comp team.
We won all three of our races and took 1st in the Out-of-town Mixed Rec division. There were only two other teams in the division, but both were near our level. One of the teams was Portland Castaways who have come to Vancouver and Victoria in past years and the other was X-Generals. VanCity had been placed in the Comp division.
The races themselves were well run (ie on time, no false starts), but on a very relaxed schedule - 20 minutes between heats. There were only 15 teams at the festival. The festival supplied steerspeople were okay, but there was nothing challenging about the course and no valid reason for insisting on only using festival supplied steerspeople.
FMG as event managers? Not pleasant. I have never before had the pleasure of being treated like children at a festival by the organizers. For example, one of the rules FMG has is that there is zero tolerance for drinking alcohol while you're racing. If they smell alcohol on anyone's breath, the entire team would be disqualified.
I don't particularly have a problem with the rule per se, most festivals have a rule about not allowing anyone to race if they appear to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol. What I do have a problem with is the amazing number of times FMG felt they had to remind teams about this. First they announced at the managers meeting. Then they told the whole team as we lined up for our first race. And the second race. Plus they proudly announced the policy over the public address system at least 20 times during the day.
To me it seemed as though FMG felt they couldn't trust teams to respect the rule and felt they needed to beat it into everyone repeatedly.
The race announcer also stated a couple of times that if a boat ended up in the wrong lane, the team would be assigned a time penalty. How is this possible when
the festival supplies the steerspeople and the team has no control over where it goes! I'm not sure whether it was a case of the announce using the same "script" he uses for every festival FMG does or he was really serious. Can you say automatic protest if a penalty had been assigned?
But on the other hand, FMG was very proud of the fact that in "17 years of organizing, they had only allowed one protest." That says to me that they don't run very competitive festivals.
The other comments posted here previously about penalties being assigned for unbuckling lifejackets or dropping paddles are all true.
The racing was fun and location was great, but I don't know that I want to go back to another FMG run event.
StraightLine.
