Owen wins Bling in Singapore!
The weekend was the 24th annual Singapore river regatta held on a
stretch of the Singapore river adjacent to boat key - a tourist strip
with many parallels to darling harbour in Sydney with restaurants, bars,
pubs etc extending along the river front for the length of the race
track which was around 350m.
Standard regatta set-up - heats on Saturday, finals on Sunday. It
monsooned down hard around lunch time on the Saturday and the racing was
put on hold for a couple of hours - apparently this happens every year!
When we went back out, the amount of crud that was washed into the water
from the runoff made blackwattle bay seem like a pristine oasis in
comparison!
The team I paddled for are called Auscham and are, notionally, an ex-pat
aussie team. In actual fact aussies make up only about 25% of the
paddlers in the club but that is not unusual and most of the other
ex-pat teams (germans, brits, canadians etc) are similar.
There were many, many teams in open, womens and mixed in both 10 and 20
man boats in many, many categories. The piccies are of the gold medal
we won in the so-called "ex-pat" race - there are quite a few teams that
contest it but from what I can gather it usually ends up being a grudge
match between the Aussie team and the Canadian team. Apparently the
Canadians have won everything else this year, so the long standing
members of the aussie team were stoked to win this one as it meant a lot
in the salvage some pride stakes.
All in all a fun day but nothing on city dragons!
O
