while on our travels so far I haven't really made paddling a priority, but I have looked into it for each of the cities we've lived in (with most cities not having db, unsurprisingly). this is definitely something i want to keep doing if i keep traveling. i think it's a lot of fun. a great way to see the city from a different view, teammates are generally very cool and will give a tour / tips when paddling, i get to learn how others organize practices, clubs, etc.
I attended a couples practices in boston with boston1 and wolfpack. and i steered a double practice from j's chinese fraternity. in seattle tho, i went nearly every free weekend i had! i did five practices total with flying dragons (one at each practice site), tacoma, and sake.
seattle flying dragons: dock sponsorship by kenmore air seaplanes!, two practice locations: south lake union and kenmore, south lake union has a better view, but kenmore is prettier, semi structured practices, good pre-practice newbie coaching, less boat coaching. our boat (which did have newbies) didn't have a coach at all. we did have a newer steer, who did a lot of stroke counting, but no actual coaching. requires at least two steers on each boat, with the reserve steer sitting near the back.
tacoma: used to rent their boats out to cdba for treasure island race, very freeform, no stretching, no assigned seating, paddlers picked drills. we didn't have a lot of paddlers that day, maybe cause it had rained a lot the day before?, so practice was very very freeform. but i heard from sake that they are less structured than other teams and apparently there's never assigned seating.
club sake: biggest and oldest team in area, also has sup and oc teams, lake washington, by far the most administratively organized of the three and the most structured practices. tho the coach i was with for both practices founded wam, so should i paddle again in seattle, i'll have to check out wam. i wanted to paddle with them this time, but they coincidentally didn't have practice the day i had free. in addition to a steer, they also have a safety person on board who i guess handles capsize stuff in case it happens.
in general: all the teams were nearly all white, and mostly seniors. the seattle teams were a great majority women. they're mostly on buks, with a few champions (i think these boats were all newer too). mostly kialoa paddles, including their carbon "community" paddles. all on fresh water with docked boats. practices are two hours long, with long sets (all did at least 10min).
tacoma and club sake both paddle with extra weight on board if there are an uneven number of paddlers. tacoma has a cool wood bracket thing that sits on an empty bench with circular weights that can be adjusted. sake has a big sealed jug of kitty litter (so the extra weight is called "kitty").
teams own their own boats, and have to pay for moorage (unless they have sponsors) so maybe team fees are more expensive so only older people can afford it? no idea. what definitely makes long beach (and la) different is that we have high school and college teams, which feed into adult teams, which means that we skew much younger than the seattle area teams.
bit of "gossip" i learned from the wam founder / sake coach. wam had combined with another (south?) washington team for a tourney so she reached out in advance to get weights and THEY DIDN'T KNOW. apparently they always just... kind of guessed? lol wtf.
very lastly, i did learn a few "fun" drills that i had in my notes app on my phone, but that died so who knows if i'll get those back. from what i remember tho:
7-up: rate increasing every seven strokes
20 seconds regular (reset), 20 seconds long, 20 seconds back kick, repeat
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