Powerhouse Dragon Boat Racing Club & Middlesbrough Outrigger Canoe Club
On September 9th Stockton hosted the City Games. As part of this brilliant event the River came to life with a flotilla of craft. Powerhouse participated in our small boat adorned with bunting and a dinosaur ….. Was great fun to see the river come to life with so many craft.
After a wonderful season of racing Powerhouse are preparing for our 21st appearance at the National Cup. This is a 2 day event held at the National Water Sports Centre in Nottingham. Clubs from around the country will start to arrive on Friday in Preparation for a weekend of racing and mingling. Its a fantastic event when you get to catch up with friends old and new. We have been preparing hard on the River Tees and look forward to competing at the last event of the season. Watch this space for photos and an update on results.
The crew managers meeting ran to time and the crew managers were led out and back to their teams by the lion who had arrived to dance and bless the festival.
The first league event of the 2017 season and the day started at 7am with the Powerhouse team finishing off the preparations for the arrival of 17 club
The course had been buoyed on Saturday and weeks and weeks of preparation and planning was about to be tested.
The first races of the day saw the super 12 racing in Junior, ladies and open category. Our juniors joined up with another crew to make a boat of 20. It was fantastic to get that many juniors at an event racing together and the result was just as fabulous.
Times :- Powerspartans 1st place with a time of 52:81 (2nd 56:94, 3rd 58:45, 4th 1:05.32)
We had 6 juniors paddling and or drumming and they slotted into the boat with some current GB under 18’s and performed brilliantly. Comments from the bank said that they couldn’t pick them out as they blended so well. They must have been really nervous for their first race, regardless of the fact that they got in a strange boat with other juniors they had never met before. I cannot describe how proud we all are of them
Powerhouse open 12 ran the course in 50:47 with Powersaints coming in third with a time of 57:02 we were pipped by Firestorm who had a rolling start there time was 56:26 beating us by 0.76 grrr.
Onto the standard races. What a performance, standard boat racing saw us paddling against Premier crews and my goodness did they know we were there. The final finished with us in 2nd place of the major plate final behind Henley on 2:16.91, Powerhouse 2:17.33, Rage 2:20.00 and 3 Rivers 2:20.50. We were only 0.42 of a second behind Henley (loud applauds and pats on the back all round) We came 9th overall out of 17 crews.
What a fantastic day.
Dragonboat Clubs from around the country arrive in Stockton over the weekend for the 1st Dragonboat League Event of 2017. We are expecting 17 clubs who aer bringing 22 teams teams to race on the Tees. The points gained will be the first ones in the league tables for this season.
To open the season there will be a lion dance to bless the festival.
We have a cafe selling hot drinks, baon and sausage sandwiches, soup , cakes, snacks etc.
Powerhouse are delighted to host the first event on our fully bouyed 4 land course.
We continue to help raise money for charity with our first Sport Relief paddlathon. Local staff from Sainsburys took to the river to paddle thier sport relief mile finishing off with a two boat race. Everyone had a wonderful time and we will let you know how much money was raised.
As we see the the clocks about to change and the racing season looming Powerhouse have an exciting year ahead. We are hosting the National League event on 29th May and we are currently in training getting ready for the start of the race season with our first event being Crosby on the 1st May bank holiday weekend.
We have 6 members who have been selected for the Great Britain Senior Team to race in Rome in July and the club are hosting a number of events this year including a Sport Relief day for Sainsburys that was a huge success.
