Article by: ALAN SMYTHE

Dragon boating in New Zealand started on a large scale after I had been to Hong Kong several times and seen dragon boat racing on the Fragrant Harbour. I knew that with 20 paddlers, mixed crews, non-contact and upper body exercise, plus the very sociable nature of the sport, Aucklanders would take to this new sport. I had no idea at that time that it would also spread as far south as Dunedin.

A woman who at that time was probably the best salesperson in New Zealand, Sharon Hoggard, contacted me following a project which I ran... the Great Investment Race which raised $1.6 million for children's medical research. I suggested dragon boat racing and being the fireball she was Sharon was out there selling crew entries and boat sponsorships like crazy. Roger Lampen agreed to be the first sponsor, Ian Ferguson and later Paul Macdonald came on board and we were off!

The first boats were built by Tony Free in Napier and our first Lampen Dragon Boat Festival was held alongside the Western Viaduct... and what a chaos. Huge macho men's crews from companies like Fisher and Paykel, Pacific Steel, Fletcher Contstruction had been going to the gym, training for weeks etc to have a shot at the Open Championships main prize, a trip to represent New Zealand at the World Dragon Boat Championships in Hong Kong... but disaster was at hand.

Only a week before the event itself we got a late entry from the Orakei Marae... a crew calling itself Genuine Maori Made fronted up with the entry fee and had, I think, one session in a boat. Come the day and they got through to the ten-boat final. Right at the start they were ahead of the rest of the field... trouble was, that whilst they could paddle like crazy, they couldn't control the boat, cutting across the entire field and leaving just two boats afloat. Fisher and Paykel, a great crew, cruised through to a win and it was then that I made the worst decision...to re-run the final.

The trip to Hong Kong was won by Lawton Construction, Fisher and Paykel threatened us with court action and on it went, culminating in a disastrous appearance in Hong Kong. The Lawton Construction crew discovered they couldn't boss the group of kayakers they had enlisted to beef up their crew. The kayakers went on strike. Hearing this in Auckland, the Lawton family partiarch, Ron, raced around his building sites in the city picking the biggest guys he could find, galloped them onto a Singapore Airlines flight to Hong Kong and arrived to take over. A short-lived dockside brawl erupted (a really good look for the All Blacks of dragon boat racing, I thought)...the NZ crew with all these inexperienced paddlers sank in the first race... the Lawton family took to the mattresses in a distant hotel and we waited for it all to go away.

A year later we started the Wellington Dragon Festival, again under the sponsorship of Roger Lampen... a couple of years later the ChCh festival and then a few years in Dunedin. The Wellington festival always had better heart than the Auckland event... lots of corporates and the city getting right behind it.

It's hard now to picture how huge these events were.... street parades watched by thousands.... an audience in one year of nearly 50,000 on grandstands on Princes Wharf...over 100 crews from all over the North Island.

But the best event by far in my view was always the Karapiro regatta with crews from all over NZ, perfect water, a huge marquee with a top band, camping everywhere... lordy it was a phenomenon!