Revenge of the dragon: the results

Back in 2024 somebody suggested we sign up for the annual Bradford Dragon Boat Racing Festival at Roberts Park in Saltaire.

Always game for a new experience, we assembled a team and jumped right in (not literally) to learn how to paddle. An exhausting but fun day later, we’d stormed to penultimate place, ahead only of the team which failed to even show up!

So when we decided to enter 2025’s festival (held last weekend), there was a lot riding on it: would we manage to improve our position?

Resplendent in our subtle and understated FoodSavers t-shirts, in our first race we left ourselves plenty of room to improve, clocking up a time of 1m20.1s – but still good enough for 24th out of 35 teams.

With some excellent coaching from our helmswoman for race 2, we were delighted to shave nearly 3 seconds off our time, although with everybody else improving that was still only the 23rd best time of the round.

However, in the final heat of the day we slashed another 4 seconds off, for a fastest time of 1m13.2s – 15th in the round.

With the final rankings decided on teams’ single fastest times from all three heats (and other teams setting faster times in earlier rounds), our round 3 time was enough to place 24th overall, a very satisfying improvement on last year. More important was the improvement in team work and timing reflected in going 7 seconds faster, and the noticeable difference in the feel of the boat when we all pulled together. Draw your own parallels…

Of course the primary reason for taking part was to raise awareness and funds for the FoodSavers Network – and it’s not too late to donate. Why not drop us £11 for the 11 teams we were faster than – or £24 for our final placing (although that might encourage us to do worse next time!). Whatever you can give makes a huge difference in our mission to ensure that everybody has access to affordably healthy food and the opportunity to build financial resilience.