I’m always down to try new things, whether it’s restaurants, sports, or places to go. So when I asked my friend, Chelsea, to hang out over the weekend and she invited me to her dragon boat practice, my response was “definitely!” followed by lots of questions. “What is dragon boat racing exactly?” “Are we in a boat paddling, are we controlling a boat from a remote control, or are we building a boat that we hope the wind will carry it across the water for us?,” “Is it hard?”

Turns out it’s a pretty competitive sport, where people are in a long slim boat paddling in unison, to the rhythm of their captain beating a drum. The front of the boat gets decorated with a dragon head and the back of the boat with a tail. If you want to see some actual competitors, here’s a short clip that wows me.

Chelsea ended up on the team through her place of employment. She works for Hakkasan Group, which is one of the top companies in nightlife and restaurants in Vegas, if not all over the world. The company is large and loves doing cool activities like this, but this certain occasion is a fundraiser for St. Rose Dominican. It’s called Rose Regatta and all the proceeds go to their Responsible Early Detection Rose Program, which will help find better ways to detect breast cancer in patients early on. That’s something I can definitely get behind. Chelsea obviously must have felt the same to join the team. Another awesome thing about the Hakkasan team is that they have won the gold medal in the race the last two years. They really want to defend their title.

Chelsea said it was cool if I came even though I don’t work for the company, so we drove over to Lake Las Vegas. I had never been to this area before, but it did not feel like we were in Vegas anymore. It was very green and the lake was bigger than I imagined. There were cute restaurants on the lake and the buildings were all nice looking. It was Saturday night so they had a stage set up to have live music later in the night. It seems like a nice weekend getaway, but I wouldn’t want to live out there just because it is still far from everything else (at least to me, but I hate driving). There were hotels and of course really fancy houses on the water, but there were apartments near the lake too.

We met up with our group and there were 15 of us, including the team captain and a lady who watched our technique from the back of the boat and gave us pointers. We all put on life vests and grabbed a paddle and walked over to our boat. The team captain numbered us off, I don’t know what her formula was but I’m sure she knew what she was doing. I was paired with this girl I didn’t know, but she seemed to know what she was doing. I was getting a little nervous. What if I was the worst one here? The captain seemed very serious and competitive. I didn’t want her to call me out if I was bad. Chelsea was three rows in front of me on the same side so I didn’t talk to her again until we got off the boat.

Once the captain explained the basic technique for rowing, we got away from the dock and paddled around the lake. Let me tell you, our first interval of paddling felt like forever to me. All I knew was that practice was an hour long, but I didn’t know anything else. I was thinking there was no way I was going to be able to paddle straight for an hour. My top hand was starting to tingle. Water was splashing in my eye, making my contact all blurry. The sun hadn’t set yet so I sweating profusely. Probably after 90 seconds, we stopped. Phew!

Turns out the actual race is only 250 meters, which will only take around a minute and 15 seconds, which made me feel a lot better. I can definitely give it all I have if it’s for that short amount of time. The practice was way more intense than that though. Sometimes she had us paddle for five minutes straight, upping our pace and having us do “power strokes” (aka paddling harder). It was a workout; I woke up sore the morning after.

We traveled pretty far down the lake, stopping occasionally so she could give us tips and show us proper technique. We did get to see a wonderful sunset and once the sun went down the weather was perfect. I wish I could have taken more photos, but we did not get much downtime. Plus I didn’t want to the captain to think I was just there for pictures. There weren’t too many people out on the water. We saw one paddleboarder and a huge boat go by us. Before I knew it the hour was up and we made it back to the dock. My life vest was soaked from all the splashing, but thankfully no one had fallen in. It was fun and I told Chelsea I’ll be back if the practices don’t interfere with my work schedule.

After the captain gave us a talk about making sure we are giving it everything we got before and during the race, everyone dispersed. Chelsea and I decided to make the most out of our time at Lake Las Vegas. We grabbed dinner at this Italian restaurant, Luna Rossa, and sat out on the patio since it was perfect out. They had the band playing on the lake right in front of us so we got to listen to live music the whole time. The food was bomb and I meant to get 10% off the bill by checking in on Yelp, but of course, I forgot, haha.

Overall a really enjoyable night 🙂