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The Sponsor
The Iowa Sister States organization registered at the 1999 Greater Des
Moines Dragonboat Festival. Because the organization was not able to
obtain enough participants for a team they sponsored us, the
Adventurous Dragonboat Paddlers.
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The Team
Our team consisted of co-workers of Claus, their spouses, and
co-graduate-students of Melissa. (Warm-ups are even for
dragonboat races.)
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Team Profile:
Team Adventurous Dragon-boat Paddlers (ADP), sponsored by Iowa Sister States,
consists of a collection of Systems Analysts, programmers and staff from the
Administrative Data Processing Center (ADP Center) at Iowa State University,
plus a variety of students, spouses and friends. Not a group to be taken
lightly, these computer professionals know how to keep an "18 PROCESSOR
ENGINE" operating in "SYNCHRONOUS MODE", resulting in paddles that "BYTE"
into the water and produce the "HARD DRIVE" necessary to "RAM" a speeding
Dragon Boat across the finish line in first place!
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Practices
For dragonboating it is very important to keep all the paddling synchronized.
So it's quite a good idea to practice synchronized paddling.
To practice this and to get most of us used to the workout we rented a rowboat
and several paddles from the University and practiced at a near by lake
called West Petersons Pit.
The rowboat is a bit different than the dragonboat. The rowers in a dragonboat
are closer to the water and the seats are closer together in the dragonboat
than the rowboat.
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The Race
A race consists of two heats of 300 meters. The winner of the heat is the team
whose flag catcher pulls the flag from the buoy first. If a team is not able
to retrieve the flag the team gets 10 seconds added to the other teams time.
There where two brackets, the winner and the looser brackets. The first race
decides in what bracket the team is competing. The following races eliminate
the losers from the competition.
For the first race we got a bye (instant win) since there was an odd number of
teams. We still had a race but it did not count in the competition. We won
that race but unfortunately we lost the next one and did not advance to the
final races.
We had a lot of fun that day and are looking forward to participate in the
dragonboat race next year.
(The weekly picture page has another picture of the dragonboat race)
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