Dragon boats will take over a Tacoma waterway this month. You should go see them
If you’ve been down to the Thea Foss Waterway, the busy water boundary between downtown Tacoma and the Port of Tacoma, you’ve likely gotten the chance to observe a wide array of boats drifting by – yachts, sailboats, tugboats, kayaks.
But have you ever noticed the dragon boats?
If you’ve spent a significant amount of time near the waterway, it’s likely you have. According to Shiela Marsh from the Tacoma Dragon Boat Association, they’re out on the waterway nearly every single week of the year.
“We maybe miss three weeks a year,” Marsh told the News Tribune. “Think about the Pacific Northwest. You go out and do stuff, and it doesn’t matter if it rains or snows. I wasn’t born in this area, but I’ve lived here most of my life, and it’s just always beautiful out on that waterway.”
If you haven’t noticed dragon boats on the Foss, now is a good time to check them out. Practices are ramping up, and teams are arriving from all over because the Rainier Dragon Boat Festival is coming up on May 16.
What is Dragon Boating?
Dragon boating is a fun, high-energy, loud team activity that usually involves 10-20 paddlers, plus a steersman (to steer), and a drummer (to keep rhythm). There are races, ceremonies and competitions that include dragon boats all over the world.
It’s called “dragon boating” due to the long shape of the boats and ornamental dragon head usually found on the bow.
Chinese legend tells the story of poet and patriot Qu Yuan, who drowned 2,300 years ago in the Mi Lo River in the Hunan Province of China. Local fishermen saw Qu Yuan in the water and paddled out to save him, banging drums to keep the fish away while they searched for his body.
They were too late to save him, but Chinese tradition honors Qu Yuan on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese calendar every year in celebratory dragon boat races and regattas all over the world.
How to paddle a dragon boat
On May 4, members of the Tacoma Dragon Boat Association (TDBA) were nice enough to allow me to accompany them on one of their practice sessions on the Thea Foss Waterway. We met up at their headquarters, which consists of a tiny floating shack at Johnny’s Dock Marina.
The first thing that struck me was the wide array of people waiting to paddle out.
“Anyone’s welcome, any time. And it’s free,” Marsh said.
It’s true. There were dragon boat veterans who had been paddling with TDBA for over a decade, and there were people like me, who had never even seen one before.
TDBA keeps two 20-person boats and one 10-person boat in the water at the marina at all times. I was slightly disappointed to notice that theirs didn’t have dragon heads, but Marsh pointed out that the heads will be painted on during a ceremony at the upcoming Rainier Dragon Boat Festival called “The Eye Dotting Ceremony,” where a chosen participant has the honor of drawing the dragon’s eyes onto the boat.
Once the TDBA had loaded the dragon boat up, they asked me to hop in last. Well, not “hop in,” that would be reckless. Everything in a dragon boat is a process. You stay low and center your balance. Otherwise, everyone goes in the drink.
Things were quite a bit less stable than I imagined, but once I sat down on the bow and the paddlers got going, the boat immediately stabilized.
After some time watching from the bow, I announced that I felt like a slacker and that I wasn’t pulling my weight.
“That’s because you’re not!” a voice in the back yelled good-naturedly at me.
It was decided that I needed to paddle. I handed my GoPro camera off to another participant and took his place among the paddlers.
“I’ve paddled canoes and kayaks before,” I announced. “I can do this.”
“No, it’s nothing like that,” Constance Baird, who was seated behind me, answered. “It’s completely unintuitive. You need to straighten your arm and push with your feet. And reach forward as far as you can and dig your paddle deep.”
Baird was a great coach but definitely in the unfortunate position of being directly behind a new paddler. She got soaked, and I soaked myself. When I got out, everyone else in the dragon boat was completely dry except Baird and me.
When I stood up on the dock, News Tribune visual journalist Brian Hayes looked at me and said, “What did you fall in?”
The Rainier Dragon Boat Festival
The Rainier Dragon Boat Festival started with an exhibition at the Maritime Fest in 1999. It was so successful that the Rainier Dragon Boat Festival began on the Thea Foss Waterway the following year (2000).
“It’s one of the first regattas in the Pacific Northwest, and probably one of the largest,” Marsh says.
The TDBA loads 44 teams into Thea Foss Park every year, twelve community teams made up of local amateur enthusiasts, and the rest are club crews that come from as far as Oregon and Canada. Each team has a minimum of 22 paddlers, totaling at least a thousand people dragon boating throughout the day.
The festival starts at 9 a.m. on Saturday, May 16, and runs 300-meter heats every 8 minutes.
Some of the divisions include women’s, mixed, survivors, youth, 40-and-older, 50-and-older, and para athletes.
When the day is over, a metal ceremony will be held at Thea’s Park (which will also have a few food trucks, coffee, and arts and crafts set up).
“It’s really fun to watch,” Marsh says. “And it’s all about teamwork.”
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