Dragon Boats
On May 4th, I sat near the Longfellow Bridge in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 4th seat of a Northeastern University Novice 8-person Resolute boat. On a normal race day, my boat would have to wait there, near the starting line, for only 10-20 minutes. However, a piece of equipment had broken in our boat, forcing us to delay the race for at least thirty minutes. Well, you may not know this, but those Boston Duck Tour boats all travel under the Longfellow Bridge, then they turn around, and go back to where they came from.
So, naturally our boat became a tourist attraction, and there were pictures of us being taken from the dozens of Duck Boats that passed us. We didn’t exactly appreciate this celebrity lifestyle–we felt like animals stuck behind a glass window being perpetually photographed. However, at one point the annoying flashes disappeared and shifted in another direction. Wondering what the commotion was all about, our Ports “backed” and the Starboards “rowed” to turn our boat around.
What we saw was this extremely long boat with about 10 rows of pairs of people all paddling down the river. On the front of the boat was an intricate Chinese dragon head. There was a person standing on one end of the boat and another person sitting in the bow–facing the paddlers. Apparently, the person standing in the boat is known as the sweep. The sweep is also known as the helmsman or steersman, and this is the person who controls this boat with a sweep oar rigged at the rear of the boat. The other non-paddler is known as the drummer, and she or he is considered the heartbeat of this boat because they lead the crew with the rhythmic beating of a drum.
And the people making this boat, called a dragonboat, move are called the paddlers!
I had never seen a dragon boat before, but apparently there are even big dragon boat races in Boston! If you have never seen a dragon boat before, this is a sight that you have to see! The boats are very intriguing, and it is interesting to see how so many people paddle one boat.
