Team Kappa and Team rise teamed up for this competition. There were around 14 Kappa members and 8 Rise members. We called ourselves “Hama no Rappa (浜のラッパ)”. Basically it was derived by combining the teams name and our practice location which is in  Hamadera.

There were only 3 Teams competing for the womens category: Spirit Club, The Mama’s, and Rappa. We had 3 races, one in morning, noon and afternoon. It was really a close race between Spirit Club and our team. On every race they beat us around 2-3 seconds. We ended up 2nd place, which is actually a great accomplishment.

What’s great about this race is that the 2 teams have not done any practice together. It was more of a trial and error part. The 2 teams rowing technique is totally different, good thing we were able to synchronize somehow.

We won 3kg of meat for yakiniku, a toilet aircon ( i don’t know what it looks like ) and a National Refrigerator ( who wants to buy this ref ?? ).

We had a yakiniku party after. Everybody has gone home already, when the weather turned bad, wind started picking up and there was lightning. It was really scary since the area was so flat and open space. Good thing after about a few minutes the weather went back to normal… so its eating time. Lots of food.. and the girls were bonding

I had a great day, I could not believe that I could do 3 races in one day and its 400 meters per race. The boat was bigger than usual, there were 2 drummers one in front and in the middle. The paddle was also a bit longer . And finally I get
to see Biwako up close and personal.

Pictures:

Team Rappa

To get there:
Biwako can be reached by JR or Kintetsu Line. For JR, from Osaka to Otsu or Zeze cost 950yen(one way).
The place is great for BBQ, biking and other water sports.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Dragonboat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.