Rowing, Dragon Boat & Outrigger Clubs

Competitive rowing grew up on English and continental rivers in the 1700s and 1800s, with the Thames watermen's Doggett's Coat and Badge race running since 1715, the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race from 1829, and Henley Royal Regatta from 1839. Dragon boat racing is far older, tied for over two thousand years to the Duanwu festival of southern China and the legend of the poet Qu Yuan drowning in the Miluo River; its modern sporting form was organized out of Hong Kong in the 1970s and spread worldwide from there. Outrigger canoeing descends from the Pacific voyaging canoes of Polynesia and was revived as a racing sport in Hawaii and Tahiti through the twentieth century, where long open-ocean crossings became its signature.

Most clubs run a learn-to-row course or a come-and-try dragon boat session, and you do not need to be strong or know how to swim well beyond basic confidence in the water. Expect to spend the first hour on a stationary machine or a stable barge learning where your hands go and how not to catch a blade, before you get near a race boat. You will feel clumsy, you will get splashed, and you will almost certainly be handed a mug of tea and folded into the crew banter faster than you expected, because a boat that is one person short simply cannot go out.