Thank you all for attending this years festival. The last race will take place in ten minutes. The festival was an enormous success however our new race results systems had a glitch on Sunday. We truly hope you understand this technical difficulty. It was a great weekend and we encourage your constructive feedback in the coming weeks. Our team was extremely happy to host you all this year. Thank you all and we look forward to 2007.

Kind Regards,

John Brooman

I don't want to hype Ottawa to death, but this weekend clearly showed this festival as the best in Canada. All of this is thanks to the progressive thinking of the organizers who have constantly worked to better the festival each year.

Hats off to you guys and thanks!

Ok, that's a little far-fetched. It was a good festival, but it does have some work to do.

Good.............
8 lane heats!
lots of races
nice beach
great venue


Needs work........
race schedule - should group teams together sooner. Saturday races were only used to find the top 60 teams for Sunday?
race results - plasma screens were neat, but didn't really cycle through all race results. Technology is great, but sometimes it's better to keep it simple. Just post results on a board so that everyone can see them.

In general a great festival. The orgnaizers did great, and hopefully next year will be even better.

Ottawa is AN OUTSTANDING FESTIVAL AND THE ABOVE MENTIONED CANNOT EVEN HOLD A CANDLE TO THEM. Great organization, volunteers galore, high-tech results posted within minutes of each race (some glitches but who cares?) great venue, healthy, clean, lot's of shade, lot's of parking, easy to get to (Tidbrf = just plain dumb to get to), BATHROOMS BY THE MASHALLING AREA = BRILLIANT! Vendors everywhere with great food and goods, great competition (dozens of great crews) and very reasonably prices ($925 vs $1500- $2500 for Midbrf or Tidbrf) fair course, deep water - what the hell more do you want? The organizers should be very proud and my crew will return next year.

Great Awards ceremony and generous hardware.

Thank you Ottawa, we will be back.

Ottawa is certainly a festival that cannot be missed. Many high points that other festivals should strive to equal. Such things as:
1) No real lane bias (at least none that I felt)
2) 8 lanes, that can really get races going on fast
3) bathrooms by the marshalling area
4) ample amount of volunteers
5) decent venue for paddlers
6) good attempt to post result, standings real time
7) nice docks

Some things to improve:
1) software glitches (not their fault really)
2) maybe because of the sheer number of teams attending, it seemed there were not quite enough bathrooms (big shout out to the poor volunteers who had to stand and monitor to help facilitate the free washrooms)
3) better viewing for the general public (ie levelled benches)
4) while the 100 was extremely exciting, I am still a believer in the 250 (ok personal preference, I know ... sorry)

I initially agreed with the previous poster who was questioning the Sat. purpose of racing. After some thought, I think it is ok but with a slight modification. Sat. races should be for time and best of 2 is ok. This should then place you into the top 60 for Sun. where the boats should be set to race off with like timed boats.
In addition, I am not sure if the starter was different between Sat. and Sun. because the Sun starter seemed to just sort of have the boats line up and then go whereas the Sat. starter was more meticulous in lining up the boats before he started the race.

There can always be work done to improve a festival

...the difference is the Ottawa festival organizers will actually do it!

"high-tech results posted within minutes of each race (some glitches but who cares?)"

Were you there? The results monitors were essentially useless on Sunday. If you weren't at the results tent during the 10min window after your race that your results were posted, you missed them forever. And forget trying to track where your competition was at.

Glitches are understandable and forgiveable, but don't ignore the issue and the very reasonable suggestion of having a paper based back-up, just in case someone kicks out your monitor cord.

The race progression was also a bit of a mystery. This needs to be cleared up and tightened up. Head to head results for place have to enter into it sometime BEFORE the final race. 5 races, and the only race where place counts is the final? That's just weird.

The dock volunteers were extremely courteous and friendly. Nice job.

Marshalling was done well, but maybe a tad too stringent. Really, my team can count to 20 (or 22). You don't need to babysit us.

About the racing itself, I think the officials could stand to be a bit more strict on starting procedures. Running starts were the order of the day. You had to cheat to stay in it. This only encourages teams to take larger and larger liberties. At the very least, the top 3 or 4 finals should have been held to dead stop.

Venue was superb. It's great to see 8 lanes across. Lots of boats, lots of bodies. But unless you start grouping teams together based on ability sooner then you continually get the image of 1 or 2 boats racing away from the other six. It doesn't look like racing. Every race looks like an opening round heat until the final.

Lots of vendors, lots of greenspace, nice beer tent.

Give it 4 stars out of 5, within easy reach of 5/5.

Ottawa is a great festival overall, however the marshalling areas need to have canopies for sun or possible rain protection. This weekend, teams were forced to stand in the strong sun too long.
What if it had rained?
John, please fix that for next year.
Thanks

What kind of festivals do you people go to that don't have bathrooms by the marshalling area? Are you all new to this?

"What if it had rained?"

It's a water sport

"What if it had rained?"

Obviously, you weren't at Pickering...

Bathrooms in the marshalling area.

I've never seen it. Makes much sense.

MIDBRF mashalling area. What if it rains? Both Pickering and Lachine were miserable but then what are you going to? Build a dome over every site? C'mon.

Excellent festival overall. My crew is coming back in 2007.

Compared to TIDBRF or MIDBRF Ottawa rules. They have excellent organization and run possibly the best festival in the East. Try asking some of the clowns who run the Toronto or Montreal festivals to improve and they do nothing, except maybe charge more the next year to line their pockets. Excellent boats, excellent lanes, cultural elements all there for the small Chinese community, great family venue. Other festival organizers should be taking notes or like all things you will lose business. To all crews next year, why waste your time with TIDBRF when you can come to a real festival run by pros? Events Alive will be back, along with Dragon Beasts and many others.

Nice Rah Rah JB, really, I think the key is that 360 teams raced this weekend and not one festival that I know of could have handled that number, thank goodness for two well run festivals in Ontario.

Ottawa, awesome organization, may want to consider held starts.

Toronto, medals, 4 races, thanks for listening.

Hats off to Dragon Boat Canada and all festival organizers, the sport just keeps growing folks.

I'd book GWN quick before it fills!!!!

My feedback, great event overall and I hope we go back. Great location, great facilities, good boats, fair course, lots of races (6 wow), tough competition everywhere.

Held starts. Need them or at least enforce some form of stopped lineup. Teams got to the staging bouys and then jockeyed to see who could get to the line last and be moving the fastest without being tooooo obvious.

Pretty much killed the 100meters without a fair start, but it sure was still fun. (Anyone have the results from that one by the way?)

Race progressions should have more meat to them. It's fine to give two races on Saturday and then take the best time. Eliminates any chance of lane bias whinning or a timing glitch maybe ending your hopes prematurely. Sunday morning should be a quarter final with placement progression to a semi with placement progressions to the actual finals.

Also in the progression to lanes was some kinda big secret for some reason. They wouldn't or couldn't tell you which placement would give you which lane for the next race. Never seen that before.

So all in all the two constructive inputs I have in no way made the weekend bad, in fact it was great, but with these two tweaks I think it could be darn near perfect... (Oh, and maybe double the porta poties )

more port o potties yes.. otherwise, it was great.

The hardware was incredible too. How many of those huge trophies did they give out?? 18???

Ottawa is a great venue, nice lanes with little or no bias, bathrooms at marshalling area, very friendly and helpful volunteers.
There were a few things that left a bad taste in my mouth however;

- crappy starts; start officials need to be more fair with how teams lined up. we had one race where they let the race start with about half the boats that were three to five seats ahead of the start line (we weren't one of them).

- last race saturday, they were in such a hurry to get home that when one of the other boats, shortly after the start, came fully (the entire boat) into our lane and forced us to swerve sideways to avoid the collision, they just stopped us and let the race keep going and not restart. It didn't matter much to us for advancement to sunday, but why have rules if you don't enforce such obvious violations (especially when they are so nitpicky with other rules).

- glitches Sunday with results and bad communications wasted more than 2 hours of our time waiting around to see if we had another race.

- with so many volunteers and staff, why could they not take lunch in shifts? the hour and a half lunch breaks made everyone wait around longer than they had to.

- funky rules for placement progression and none of people there seemed to know what the rules were exactly

- it would have been nice to use more of the available space for team tents as it was a touch cramped

All,

We are taking to heart all your comments. We finally finished tearing down Tuesday and this is the first chance we have had to look at the forum. The race system was a real disapointment for us and is something we can guarantee will be dealt with for 2007. You can imagine how we felt, after working so hard to pull everthing else together and deliver the festival, it was to be then dealing with the challenges we faced on Sunday. Such is life.
Porta potties. I hear you loud and clear. Consider it done. I love the idea that someone put out to crete some kind of cover in the team staging area. What do other festival do? Do they tent the entire area or is it more a military net hanging unit? Please let us know. I priced out tenting the area this morning with our supplier and it would cost about $ 3,800.00. The team area will also be significantly expanded for 2007. Our first thought is to expand it over to the childrens area and also up behind the trees closer to the track field. This would effectively double the size. Another concept is to do what Vancouver does and provide the space pre tented however I think the bohemian apporach would be much nice for everyone. Let us know your thoughts. What did you think of the rest of the site? Do you like the concessions, exhibitors, entertainment, roving entertainment, childrens area, table tennis tournament, sound system, volunteers, docks, silent auction, pledge drive and everything else that was onsite? Now is the time to throw out your contructive comments. Pretend you owned this event and your mission was to make it the best possible experience a Dragon Boat Festivl could ever offer. We are beginning to plan 2007 this morning and in order to approve budgets we must have all our changes and new ideas approved in the next month. Registration will start in a few weeks so keep an eye on the website. We hope you all have a fantastic season and we look forward to finalizing plans for 2007 and the short future.

Regards,
John

You're definitely on the right track.

A nice bit of self-promotion in there regarding the concessions, table tennis, entertainment, etc, but heck, it was all good so why not?

One thing a few of us are still interested in though is the RESULTS! Where are Sunday's race times, as opposed to just the finals. Since the single operation scoreboard showed only the most recent race, a lot of us missed some of our times. Any chance on getting a new pdf posted?

And what were the results from the 100m championship?

All-in-all though, great job!

Self promotion? You have the question wrong. I just want input on every single facet of the festival. This is only way we can improve. All of the elements mentioned are equally important to the overall success of the event. Certain elements are more important to some, however as the oragnizer I do not look at any one item any different than the next.

The overall results are on the website. The top 25 final results are also posted. The 100 metre was missed and we hope it will be up later today. Our webmaster has been sent the info. If you have a specific question around results, email or phone Steph and she will be happy to give them to you. 613 238-7711 ext 226 or team@dragonboat.net

John,

The results posted as overall results are simply the fastest time from the three races on Sunday. I believe the poster above was talking about the results for all races (both Saturday and Sunday). This is what festivals usually post and what people are likely to be interested in.

...I know I am. Great festival. Congrats.

Loved the festival, but like many others, I was wondering what did we race on Saturday for??? We were in the Competitive Category, and I must say I was wishing we had just rested on Saturday and race on Sunday (I know the current structure doesn't allow it.) Maybe you could have the Communtiy Cups (or what ever they are called, can't remember) on Saturday, and then the Grand Championship on Sunday. We were baked by the time the Grand Championship Final came, as it was our sixth race,and we had travelled from very far, but this was the only race that really mattered. Can this be improves some how? We don't need lots of racing to feel we got our moneys worth, just quality racing!!

Thanks

John, Your festival was tremendous! But for an out of town team,trying to determine when our first race was on Sunday was extremely stressful. With the GWN Toronto race, we could figure it out using the program and the posted times. Please, please, please try and fix this for next year so that our time at the Byward Market is more enjoyable!!

Once again it was an amazing event. Saturday (with 190 teams x two races) was virtually flawless. I'd disagree with the poster above from June 28 2006, 6:19 PM. The extra races on Sunday were included at the request of paddlers. I don't want to travel to Ottawa for one race a day. As long as eveyone is doing multiple races its fair.

The problem with the race software on Sunday was unfortunate but I'm sure it'll be ironed out for next year. Also the advancement rules for Sunday were a bit unclear. I suggest they be revised and that the format be tweaked slightly.

My suggestions:

1. At very least don't throw out the Saturday seeding on Sunday. For teams easily inside the top 60 it rendered Saturday's races meaningless. The competitive division on Saturday was awesome. Why not seed those teams and keep them racing together on Sunday morning?

2. It would be HUGE progress if you could move to a head-to-head advancement structure on Sunday. Time-based advancement is necessary for seeding but real racing is head-to-head for placement.

After Saturday's qualifying I'd break out the top 32 into 4 heats with top to bottom seeds evenly distributed between heats. Top four from each heat advance to two top heats while the bottom 4 drop into bottom to two lower heats. The process repeats and now you have teams divided into your Chapionship, Petit, Espoir and Fun finals. It would make for great, meaninful racing all day Sunday and eliminate the dependence on flawed time-based advancement. The bottom 28 could still get their two races by being seeded into two groups of 16 and racing for their final position. Do this and your event will be nearly PERFECT.

John, overall you guys do a fantastic job and your responsiveness to paddler feedback is appreciated. Ottawa is becoming the one event of the season I really don't want to miss. Keep it up!

From a racers stand point, great festival, very well organized, good officials, results, and marshalling. But……please remember the fans, it’s great to improve the competition for the racers, but what about the fans. A dedicated spectator area along the race course (with actual stands), or maybe a mini food garden, beer tent along the course. I am not sure the logistics around any of this, but as a racer on the weekend and a big fan of the sport I found it quite hard to watch the races, there was no dedicated spot. The best viewing spot was the closed off area around the officials tower, why not erect a few stands there; you will be surprised I bet they will fill up quick.

Thanks again for a great weekend.

It's a great site and event, congratulations John. Overall, a super package. I think we have similar comments as others.

The screen with the near-instantaneous results, and up to the minute rankings is very nice. But as some suggested, getting the full results taped up on paper wouldn't hurt.

Advancements could use some more thought. Ideally you want some increasing challenges as you gear up for the final. We got some of that that but I think it might have been fluke. The Sunday qualifiers were all random draw? We never found out for sure. Any thought towards setting up a separate competitive division like in Pickering or a DBC sport race within the festival? It would make for some crazy racing over two days.

Hope you can keep the pricing at that level or similar. We're totally looking forward to coming back next year, although we may need to register before xmas at this rate. Hmmm, wait... Ottawa sucked, everybody wait to sign up... yeah that's the ticket (jk).

Side Note - watching and racing the Seniors and Dragon Beasts made up for any disappointment that Events Alive wasn't there. But if EA comes back and we have to chase three boats like that down the course we may lose half the crew to pulmonary edema. Soooo fast shudder...