Sunshine Coast Dragons Abreast

How do we describe the 6 months since Tittytittybangbang came into existence? Fantastic, fun, frenetic, all of those, plus the coming together of a wonderful, enthusiastic, inspirational team of ladies!

Since our inaugural meeting in July 2005 we have not had time to draw breath. We launched straight into fund raising at the Caloundra Classic Boat Regatta, started regular training, and bless them Zonta Club of Caloundra City Inc. came up with the funds to purchase a 2nd hand boat for us, and all of a sudden we were a team, with a boat! We cannot put into words how much we appreciate all the support and donations we have received.

We have been on an upward learning curve, and discovered many previously unknown talents of our members and
supporters, from putting together fund raising proposals, making the perfect pink lunch box for the Changing Gears riders at the Australia Zoo, design and manufacture of team shirts, and a sadistic delight in forcing us to do lunges at training sessions!

Of course, interspersed with fun, chatter and building up a tremendous team spirit we have been learning to paddle. We have discovered that there are a hundred different perfect paddling strokes, and find that we can do 18 different styles at the same time, but we are gradually learning to paddle as one, and are quite proud of our progress.

Kawana Lake, our base, is a fabulous venue, which we are looking forward to showing off to you all at the Abreast in Australia 2007 regatta. We may not be up with the top performing teams by then, but we are practicing hard on the social side and plan to have a well trained red wine drinking team in place! Early in our training schedule we pre-empted capsize drill by proving that you can’t do a swan dive off a dragon boat without dire consequences, the drill worked and a team of giggling, teeth chattering girls arrived unscathed on shore, with boat and paddles!

Not having an established sports team on the coast we have had occasions of being short of coaches and sweeps, but we now have some wonderful “volunteers” and are getting out regularly on the water. We were fortunate in Margie from Redcliffe spending her New Year Holidays with us, and arranging 4 fantastic training sessions, in a short time she transformed us from “totally useless” to “shows promise” (our words not hers), and we are now inspired to really get it together. As well as the great support from Missabittatitti, we have had visitors join us from Canberra, Darwin and Melbourne, and would dearly love anyone who is up here
to look us up, we’d love to share your experiences and glean as much information as possible.

See you on the water- soon!!

Media items below - click on images to enlarge

See Rotary newsletter about setting up Dragons Abreast on the Sunshine Coast   http://rotary9600.org/DGs%20News/Sept05.pdf

See attached letter from Alf Muller of the Caloundra Rotary Club (pdf 37kbs)