With a very successful (albeit slightly disappointing) foray at the CCWC qualifiers in Calgary under our belt, the Piranhas DBC is looking towards recruiting keen people who are interested in joining us on our pursuit towards becoming better paddlers.

While we are interested in paddlers of any gender/experience, we have a unique opportunity for any females who would be interested in paddling with us at GWN on Sept. 8-9. We’re short a girl and we might as well take this opportunity to let someone who is interested in joining us paddle with us in a live try-out. You’ll get to see/experience us in the midst of racing and we’ll get to see if you’re the type of person who would fit into our family.

Even if you’re not a female and are interested in our program, feel free to contact us or swing by our camp during GWN.

Piranhas@gmail.com

oh man..you guys should try and get Imps girl...snap! So hot right now.

Hot...as in the team's on fire? Or she's hot? And what's her name???

Hey Piranhans, you guys dropped nearly 9 seconds from your CCWC time and like 6 seconds from the island etc this past weekend @ calgary, whats up? lol, tons of practicing?

Different body of water.

How does that explain them beating the Imps?

And beating FCRCC, Pacific Reach and narrowingly losing to Gorging? This is the same Gorging that is almost as fast as the Dragon Beasts

easy to explain:

1) they had a great weekend, and a great race,
2) they were beside the fastest team.

there. now go back to work.

Thanks for noticing.

We had a very strong regatta and were posting top three times (and placements) almost all weekend. With turnover of eleven people from last year to this year, it has taken us some time to get everyone on the same page and we’re almost there. From our experience, it has generally taken a new Piranha about a year to fully integrate into our system and we’re happy to see some earlier than expected returns.

We’d also like to publicly thank our Big Fish friend who joined us in our quest for Malaysia. She’s an excellent paddler and a pleasure to hang out with.

I don't want to hijack this thread but:

"easy to explain:

1) they had a great weekend, and a great race,
2) they were beside the fastest team."

Explains little.

According to Power Demon's rankings, the average speed of the teams were:
Sudbury 2:01.7
Imps 2:03.9
Piranhas 2:07.0

Meaning the Piranhas should have lost to Sudbury by about 5 seconds and to the Imps by 3 seconds on average. From what we've been hearing (I can confirm when Calgary posts the race results) the Piranhas were all over Sudbury and ahead of Imps all weekend. I don't care who you are, all things being equal you don't suddenly have a great weekend that makes you faster 5-6 seconds consistently. So either they stacked or they got better. Based on their response, of only 1 Big Fish helper, it looks like they got better. It seems like it isn't just Hydro who can suddenly go alot faster in mid-season. I think only Hanalei is the only other team in years past that has been able to go alot faster mid-season (their traditional GWN peak).

The other explanation is simple.
The Pirahnas chose to attend regatta's that do not have great
racecourses. Waterloo, Woodstock, Island etc. Times can therefore
not always be reflected in their race time results.

Chiro's chose to race in Sudbury, Ottawa, Mariyln Bell etc.
Their times reflect course with deeper water.

Then you put them together on the same course in Calgary
and you now end up with times for the crews that reflect their
true strength.

Or they did indeed get extremely fast.

Good response. Only problem with that is PD's Power rankings numbers are use regression which is supposed to normalize all these things. Besides, Sudbury destroyed the Piranhas at the central qualifier and barely beat them at Calgary. The more I think about it, the more I think the little fishies found a way to get very fast. Either way, I don't want to take their thread off on a tangent anymore. Good luck with the recruiting fishies, I might give you a call after the season is over.

Just wanted to make sure a few things about the rankings clear:

1) The quality of times (i.e. faster courses for whatever reason, boats, lanes, wind) will be adjusted by the regression. Where a lower profile festival might yield different results is if the top-tier team attending doesn't enter their "A" team because they enter to have fun and the pressure to perform is much lower – while other lower tier teams enter their “A” team as the festival is more important to them. I’m hoping to address this next year by striking a reasonable compromise on how "competative" a festival should be in order to be entered. I don't think this is the case for the Piranhas anyways as the CCWC was their slowest true rankings festival (relative to their competition) and Woodstock up to par.

2) The gap in times between teams on the rankings does mean that in a given race you should expect the same gap, but more likely the same placing, for a few reasons:

A) These times are all adjusted to the island race course where it may or may not be easier to pull away from other crews. Therefore, the gap could easily open or close if a festival has wider/narrower or deeper/shallower lanes when compared to the island and depending on which teams are in your heat and might pull you with their wash.

B) The rankings are built using the average of races, if a crew can really ramp it up for a final, or conversely choose to take it easy in the preliminaries, you could see a significant change in placement from the rankings (generally doesn’t seem to be true – but certainly possible).

C) More obviously, bodies change, peak fitness changes, teams improve, teams get worse, people have good bad races/festivals. This never seems to make as a big difference as one might expect, with most teams posting relatively comparable times throughout the season, but there are certainly a few crews every year that manage to make some significant gains on their competition or fall into a slide, or even both.

3) I usually try to refrain from commenting on teams directly, but

“I think only Hanalei is the only other team in years past that has been able to go alot faster mid-season (their traditional GWN peak).”

Hanalei had their worst performance at GWN based on the true rankings for last year. In 2005 GWN was one of their better festivals according to the rankings, but not by a large margin.
http://www.dragonboatcanada.org/rankings/2006_byFestival.htm
http://www.dragonboatcanada.org/rankings/2005_byFestival.htm

As examples, I would site the Mofos in 2006-07 and Shogun in 2005-06 - good examples of crews that changed a great deal in terms of competitiveness for GWN.

Will this be the last race you guys are doing?

Last race for the season, yes.