Submitted by Meri Gibson

Well, it has been another amazing three months since our last newsletter.

We are lucky in New Zealand now as we right in the heart of the dragon boat season and everybody has some great regattas to attend. I have through injury been ordered by my surgeon completely out for the season, but I am living my life for vicariously by going to as many events as I can to cheer on my team and other teams.

I was fortunate enough to go to Hawkes Bay to see the beautiful new boat “Kaha”. Kaha was the name of the mascot for the New Zealand festival, which was gifted to the Dragonboat team there to help to grow the sport, and to help grow breast cancer paddling. The trust that organised the festival has also gifted another boat, three ergometers, a storage container and is subsidising the breakfast for breast cancer survivors at the New Zealand nationals and providing the flowers for the flower ceremony along with continuing to share the message of exercise is medicine.

I have always said that I am an open book, and I want IBCPC to be an open book, we want you to see what we see, if you ask us a question, we will answer it as openly and honestly as we can. Nothing is hidden we just want to share our IBCPC mission and our journey with you. To that end we have continued to review our strategic plan halfway through our five-year plan and we have certainly ticked off a lot of those boxes already.

Prior to the staging of the festival in New Zealand I shared with a number of people I answered 8,500 personal emails with questions mostly about the festival and then they just became emails that people wanted to chat away. A similar thing has happened prior to the festival in France and whilst we are not organising the festival as IBCPC, the organisers in France are closely consulting with us and ask our opinion on things, which we value very much and we are more than happy to share that information with you if we can. I had a number of people asking me things about registration and so on and again whilst we are not the organisers, we can share what we can.

It was great to see so many people registering early. The 21 early bird registrations were all taken up within the first seven minutes which was remarkably like New Zealand as ours were all taken up in the first six minutes. I can tell you that there is a spread across the globe in terms of teams that had the earlybird and they were: Austria one team, Australia six, New Zealand one, Ireland one, Germany two, France two, USA four, Canada three. Those numbers fit well with our global demographic also. The 1st registration went to Vienna Pink Dragons and No.21 went to an Australian team. Congratulations to everyone on their success. It is brilliant to see that there is a nice spread of those teams that achieved the early bird. Registration remains open for the next 12 months.

I am sure you will find a lot of interesting articles to read in the newsletter as Louise Granahan has been very diligently gathering these together, enjoy reading this. I look forward to seeing some of you around the world in the coming months.

Paddles up.

Meri xx