Community teams prep for Olympia’s dragon boat races

Paddling is familiar to many in South Sound, but just because you’ve powered a kayak or a canoe doesn’t mean you know how to tame a dragon — a dragon boat, that is.

That’s what Dana Pethia discovered when she and 19 friends signed up to race a dragon boat at the 11th annual St. Martin’s Dragon Boat Festival, set for Saturday. The sport goes back 2,000 years in China — and a decade here in Olympia, where the festival started in 2006.

Pethia and her friends, businesswomen ranging in age from 20s-50s, signed up. They, like others new to dragon boats, got a couple of practice sessions in the water. They’re an athletic bunch, but quickly learned that moving a dragon boat takes a lot of force.

Getting the boat going “requires really short, powerful pulls through the water,” said Pethia, director of fundraising events at St. Martin’s. “You’ll hear a lot of grunting.”

At times, she said, the women are doing between 70 and 75 strokes per minute. “The joke is, ‘If you feel like you can’t row anymore, keep rowing.’ ”

So far, they’re having a great time.

“The camaraderie we have has worked out well,” she said Tuesday. “We’re all so excited and intrigued by it that we’re talking about getting a group together.”

This year, 51 teams will participate in the day of races, said Sally Henry, assistant chairwoman of the festival. Sixteen are community teams, made up of novice rowers. Most of those teams are local, including four from the university, two from Joint Base Lewis-McChord and one from the Olympia Fire Department.

There also are competitive divisions for mixed-gender teams, women’s teams and junior teams, whose rowers must be under 20.

The races began with just 16 teams, and this year is the first for the junior division, which has attracted young rowers who participate in clubs in Seattle and Portland.

The festival began with the idea of celebrating St. Martin’s relationship with China. The university has been involved in cultural and educational exchange programs since 1995. Each year, faculty members teach in China, and there are 40 students from China studying at the university.

Besides the dragon boat racing, the festival includes demonstrations of Chinese traditional arts, martial arts and music, as well as offerings from other cultures.

“I wanted to focus on different cultures, to be multi-ethnic,” Josephine Yung, the university’s vice president of international programs and development, said in a 2015 video about the event (bit.ly/1TyYQqu).

As the name suggests, the boats look like dragons, with elaborately decorated heads.

Part of the event’s opening ceremonies is the Dotting the Eye Ceremony, based on Chinese tradition. That ceremony takes place at 9:10 a.m., followed by a blessing of the boats. The boat races begin at 9:30 a.m.

It was said that each year after the race, the dragons would go back to sleep. The ceremony is intended to wake the dragons by adding a dot of white paint to their eyes.

Among other dignitaries scheduled to appear, Olympia Mayor Cheryl Selby, Lacey Mayor Andy Ryder and Tumwater Mayor Pete Kmet will participate in the ceremony.

This story was originally published April 27, 2016 at 2:11 AM with the headline "Community teams prep for Olympia’s dragon boat races."