Nothing worse than wet underwear...

Yesterday I found myself in the city of Hamilton, famous for its steel mills and train tracks, located about 45 minutes west of Toronto. I went there for a dragonboat regatta, a one-day thing held in a corner of Hamilton, with a pier shoring Lake Ontario. It was tiny, consisted of only 30 teams, amateurishly-organized but still somewhat fun for me because I got to race lots and expand my DB social network.

I was a recruited addition to the Prophix Dragons, a bit of a "gong show" of a team, because they only had 15 paddlers, including me. I agreed to paddle for them out of a favour to Kynan, who I just met Wednesday, because he came out to my team practice as a volunteer coach. Short-handed, our team was so desperate for paddlers that each time we were called to marshall, our team captain would just shout out "does anyone want to paddle? Come join us!" and people would just come up and filling in our empty seats.

Of course, the true beauty is when Kevin whored me out for some paddlers... he found some friends on Team Carpe Diem, and recruited them to paddle for us too... then told me afterwards that they needed a couple of extra females paddlers and he volunteered me to paddle for them too. By the end of the day, I had paddled 4 times for the Prophix Dragons and 3 times with Carpe Diem.

But I survived and was still feeling pretty good for the last race, except that I made the detrimental mistake of sitting behind Ms. Hyper-Splashy-Splash, who scooped up more water on ME, than she actually paddled through. Somehow, though, we still managed to place second in that race, and to compensate for my soggy shorts and shoes, I was awarded with the grand prize of.... a pen.
L-R: me, Kynan (volunteer coach), Kevin (pimp), Dom (Prophix), and Matt (also Prophix)