The Dragon Divas

The season gets rolling with three big events

July 10, 2008

We have had a very busy start to our season. Our Dragon completed her facelift thanks to the amazing skills of Ann. Over the course of a couple weeks, Ann spent more than 24 hours researching and painting the head and the tail in stages. Our dragon is now proud and beautiful! We have renamed her with much appreciation: the "Annie B." She will be featured at the opening ceremonies of the Lake Phalen Dragon boat festival July 13 and 14. Our "newbies" will become veterans as we enter our first festival of the year. There are 26 teams registered. Our goal is to better our last year's finish: not last. Wish us well! Come out and root us on.

We continued our fundraising efforts with a second annual garage sale at the Birchwood Village Hall. We didn't make as much money as we did last year, but enough to substantially help us afford our attempt at three festivals this year.

We were invited to participate in the Manitou Days parade in White Bear Lake. We were left without a trailer for our dragon boat this year so our friends in Rochester allowed us to borrow boat "Big Red" for the event. The streets of downtown White Bear and the waterfront were filled with people on the beautiful June evening. We were humbled by the kind support given to us as we paraded by. As we handed out candy, we heard great stories from some of the children on the route. One in particular said that her mom used to have cancer but is all better now.

Our third big event was being featured on WCCO's 10 o'clock news on June 26.
(See the WCCO story here.)The camera crew joined us for an evening out on the lake. The journalist and photo journalist interviewed several team members then filmed our practice both from the shore and from a speed boat graciously driven the friend who houses our dragon.

Film was also taken with the photojournalist sitting between paddlers on the boat. I don's think the camera got too wet. Thankfully, The weather more than cooperated. Our boat looked beautiful against the blue sky and water. We had a lot of fun and were pleased that the finished product represented us well.