Paddling the Pawtucket
BY John HillJournal
Providence Journal, September 09, 2007
Spectators gather at Festival Pier in Pawtucket yesterday to watch the dragon boat races. About 10,000 people lined the river to watch.
PAWTUCKET -- For Bob Durgin and about two dozen of his coworkers, it may have even been better than a Jimmy Buffett concert.
The group of guards and officers from the Norfolk (Mass.) County Sheriff's office enjoyed a day at the School Street Pier by the Pawtucket River here yesterday, successfully defending their Pawtucket dragon boat title in the public officials division. They raced -- and won -- in that category last year as the Viagra Vikings. This year they called themselves The Loose Screws; most of the team members are jail guards, and screw is slang for guard.
Durgin said at first he'd been a little concerned about team turnout this year, because Buffett was playing a concert at Foxboro Stadium and a lot of their guys were working that event. But getting enough people turned out to be fairly easy, he said.
"Every year I have a bigger group of people who want to do it," Durgin said.
Members of the team from Massachusetts drove down from Quincy, Braintree and Weymouth, Durgin said. As a group, they were not particularly keen on regular practices, he said, and made up in strength what they lacked in polished paddling style.
The dragon boats are more than 50 feet long and weigh about 6 tons each. They look like garish, oversized canoes with dragon tails on the sterns and heads at the bow. They seat 22 paddlers, a steersman at the stern and a drummer at the front who bangs out a rhythm to keep the paddlers synchronized.
This year, race organizers added flag-grabbing to the races. Previously, the only thing a boat crew had to do was cross the finish line first. This year a buoy was anchored 49 feet from the finish line with a flag on it. Each boat crew had to have a member mounted on the front, leaning out on the dragon head and cradled by the antlers that rise from either side of it. The flag catcher was the only crew member who could grab the flag off the buoy. If the flag wasn't caught, the team got three seconds added on to its time.
"We didn't really care for it," Durgin said. "A lot of people thought it slowed things down."
"And it's because we're not really good at it either," crewmate Joe Toscano added.
Blackstone Valley Tourism Council President Robert Billington said the flag catching is a traditional part of how the races are run in Taiwan, and the Pawtucket event is cosponsored by the Taipei (Taiwan) Economic and Cultural Office in Boston. Some out-of-town teams from the Boston or New York areas were unhappy with the addition, he said, since they had not had a chance to train for it. It may have given local teams a bit of an advantage, he said, since the tourism council had set up a flag buoy in the Blackstone River near the Central Falls Landing for teams to use in practice runs through the summer.
This was the eighth year of the races. Billington estimated it attracted about 10,000 people to the riverside over the seven hours of races, musical performances, craft demonstrations and food sales.
The race drew 24 teams that competed in three different classes this year, less than last year's 36. Billington attributed part of the lower boat turnout to the harried management of last year's event. He said three dozen boats may have been more than the tourism council and its volunteer staff could handle.
"We grew the event so fast and so furious, we didn't realize we weren't the best race managers," Billington said.
This year's event was run by a group called 22Dragons, a Montreal, Canada-based dragon boat club that also runs a service that provides race management for organizations that want to hold dragon boat races at festivals like Pawtucket's.
"They were fabulous," Billington said. "We were done by 3 p.m." Last year the event ran until after 6 p.m.
The races are part of three-week Pawtucket Arts Festival, which includes events ranging from a Counting Crows concert at McCoy Stadium to "The Flavors of Pawtucket," a photography contest, film festival, dance and other art and entertainment. The overall Pawtucket Arts Festival runs until Sept. 16 and a schedule of events is available on the Internet at www.pawtucketartsfestival.org.
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