Submitted by Zmajke!
Dear paddlers! Every time we have something to say to this amazing group of women (IBCPC members), we get excited about it because we know that everything “dragon boat” is our way of life and that the readers will understand our excitement!
Since our last report, a lot of fantastic things have happened, but the most exciting was our 2nd anniversary celebration which included not just the anniversary but also the christening of our two new small boats. The ceremony of christening included a traditional Chinese “waking a dragon” ceremony and also a Croatian ceremony for boat christening with champagne and cutting the ribbon.
To make the ceremonies complete, of course we wanted to give names to our new “babies”. The survey among our members for potential names for our boats (one is red so a girl’s name and the other is blue – so boy’s name) resulted with 20 suggestions. The top 5 were put for voting and the final two names were Zara for the red boat (has a historic connotation for our city of Zadar) and Val for the blue (which means Wave; how appropriate for our home on the Adriatic sea).
We invited a lot of people and had a great response. There were all together approximately 100 guests! The celebration was out in the open just next to where our boats are and our guests enjoyed our amazing home-made food, desserts and of course drinks! We even made a dragon out of various fruits!
Among our guests were representatives from the medical community (oncologists and surgeons), our partners from other non-profit organizations dedicated to cancer survivors, our family members, friends, a group of sports enthusiasts who brought a visual-effects to our celebration. We also had special guests from Zagreb – a rowing and dragon boat paddling team who stayed few days with us and paddled with our team. It was a blast! The next day we all attended the “daffodil days” dedicated to fundraising for hospital equipment for cancer patients.
The last but not least, our most special guests were godmother and godfather to our boats: Iva Bencun, the director of the City Tourist Board was a godmother of Zara and Tomislav Crnkovic, the secretary of Zagreb Kayak Association was the godfather of Val. We were honoured to have them now as our “family members”!
Since our last report, we have been busy training both in the gym but more so on the water as much as the weather allowed. We are getting ready for the 5th International Dragon Boat Festival in Barcelona (May 18-19). This one is very important to our team because it will be the first DB festival in which we will race in our own categories; we are participating in three categories: master women 200m (small boat), master women 500m (standard boat) and all cancer survivor boat 200m small boat (7 BCS and 3 other cancer survivors). It’s going to be exciting!!!!!! It is going to be our “Break your Duck” moment! Wish us luck!!!!
