By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
After two years of being landlocked, the dragon boaters of the Osoyoos Lake Paddling Club have gleefully returned to the water, and with fingers crossed are looking forward to a full summer on the lake.
Established in 2003 the club has evolved over the years as participants come and go, but club president Peter Munro says the current membership is over 40 paddlers. A recent open house saw nearly 30 people brave the cold rainy Saturday to give it a shot.
Peter Munro. Don Urquhart photo
“We really haven’t been out for two years and with the open house this year we’re just astonished at how many people turned up. We lost members, but we gained a heck of a lot of new members and could have 65 potential members for this year,” said a clearly delighted Munro.
“We picked up some experienced people that have moved up here from other areas in addition to picking up some people that just wanted to come out and try it.” He added that the open house also included a ‘younger’ group of potential paddlers. And for whatever reason, there are more women than men in the club.
When asked what the general age of the club’s paddlers is, Munro waffles a tad, saying “we’re an older community here, we are a retirement community so we attract that age group.” When pressed on his definition of ‘younger,’ he laughed and said “in their 40s.”
But before you dismiss this as some sort of geriatric lollygagging on the lake, take note this is a strenuous sport. “You use your legs, your hips, your upper body – it’s not canoeing, it’s not kayaking, it’s not row boating, it’s a different type of stroke,” Munro says.
In fact, the strenuousness of the sport is one of the key reasons behind giving new recruits a month to decide if it’s for them. “We want people to come out and try it and if they say ‘you know what my hips are not quite like they should be, I don’t think it’s for me,’ then that’s a good decision.”
The new paddlers can continue to paddle until May 23 at which point they need to decide and pay the annual membership fee to continue. A one-year membership is $150 along with a one-time new member registration fee of $25. “We supply PFTs (personal flotation devices), we supply paddles, you just need to show up,” Munro says.
The appeal lies in the combination of fitness, recreation and social aspects, not forgetting just simply being out on the lake. The club also does various social events like barbecues, Christmas parties and the like, and even does moonlight paddles and Sunday brunch paddles. And you’ll be seeing them in this year’s Cherry Fiesta parade as their Dragon Boat takes to Main Street.
“We try to go out on the lake four times a week – Monday evening, Thursday evening, Wednesday morning, and Friday morning. We’re also thinking about adding another day [possibly Sunday] but we need a steerer and we need a coach,” says Munro. The timings of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. are chosen because these are the times when motorboat activity is less in the increasingly busy lake.
A full boat is 20 people plus a coach and a steerer, and despite the fact the club only has one boat it seems to even itself out because some people paddle three times a week while others twice a week, he says. The minimum required is about 10 paddlers, but this really only works on days with no wind.
Typically they spend about an hour out on the water which includes venturing from their Safari Beach Resort dock down to sw̓iw̓s Provincial Park as well as under the Osoyoos trestle bridge and into the north basin of the lake.
Aside from recreational paddling the club also offers competitive events. The club goes annually to Penticton for the kick-off of the competitive season during the second weekend in June.
Later in the year, there is another competition in Penticton and then here in Osoyoos there is what’s known as a ‘flag race’ which received a grant approved by Osoyoos Council through the provincial Resort Municipality Initiative (RMI) fund.
“We try to keep it to a maximum of 15 teams, whether we will get 15 teams this year we don’t know,” Munro says of the Dragon Boat Festival. Typically teams come from the Okanagan region and sometimes from the Lower Mainland, and two years ago they had a team from Calgary.
Munro also expresses the club’s gratitude to Safari Beach Resort which provides it with free winter storage and moorage for the boat as well as allows them to build a shed on-site to store their equipment.
The club had been previously located at Holiday Inn for a number of years but had its equipment storage flooded out twice, most notably during the bad flooding of 2018.
