Making Waves
By Mikee dela Cruz
PUBLISHED: JANUARY 2009

It is still dark, but, even at 5:00 on a Saturday morning at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) complex, things are already starting to get busy, as people jog, take brisk walks, walk their dogs, cycle or rollerblade, and start congregating for aerobic classes.  At around the same time, right beside the former Figaro Café, which is across CCP’s Tanghalang Pambansa, lightly clad men and women of various ages and sizes start to gather – first in small groups, then their numbers growing just as the sun starts to rise.  Before 6:00, they start exercising in groups, turning the car park in front of the shower area behind the coffee shop into an impromptu gym.  And by 6:30, one team after another approach one of the boats tied – not anchored – close to the seawall of the murky Manila Bay, as they go out into the open sea, ignoring its redolence.  For the next hour or two, they paddle to and from Manila Yacht Club to the US Embassy, many watching them from Manila Baywalk.

Since the late 1990s, this has actually been a common sight – lately, particularly on Saturday and Sunday, their regular training days – in Manila Bay, though even more so since after 2003, when the groups started organizing themselves, and, for that matter, as more and more people have been discovering dragon boat.

“For years, I used to come here every morning (to jog and do aerobic exercises),” says entrepreneur Chari Moral, a certified public accountant who runs her own accounting firm.  “I remember seeing the paddlers, in awe of their coordinated effort in making the dragon boat move forward.”

So when a chance to become a dragon boat paddler – the more accepted title of the people in the sport, as opposed to kayaking and rafting’s rower – came in 2000, Moral did not even think twice about joining an “overwhelming sport.”  “I spoke with some (members of the Philippine Blue Phoenix Dragon Boat Club Inc.) who participated in one of the aerobics classes (I was in at the park), and they asked if I wanted to join them when they paddled,” Moral says.  “I did – and the very first time I boarded a dragon boat, I fell in love with the sport I felt lightheaded.”

OLD SPORT

Such attraction with dragon boat paddling is nothing new, actually.  Although only recently gaining popularity in the Philippines (especially with the Philippine teams sweeping all disciplines in the dragon boat racing in the 23rd SEA Games), the sport is among the first developed by civilized men when they discovered they could brave the waters.

Legend has it that around 278 BC, a Chinese patriot-poet named Qu Yuan (340-278 BC), who advocated reforms in his home state of Chu, was banished after criticizing the emperor and his government.  While in exile, he heard that his former state was conquered by a neighboring state.  He was said to have wandered along the banks of the Mi Lo River, and was never seen again.

Along the river, fishermen hurried out their boats to rescue him, but they could find no sign of him.  Superstition set in, as the people, fearing that the fish in the river would devour Qu Yuan’s body, made rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves and dropped them into the river so the fish would eat the dumplings instead.  The fishermen also tried to scare away the fish, as well as the hungry spirits, by beating loudly on their drums and splashing the water with their paddles.

Traditionally held on the fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth moon on the lunar calendar (late May to mid June on the solar calendar) people living in South China made it an annual event to race boats to commemorate the day when people rushed out to the river to rescue Qu Yuan, as well as to celebrate Qu Yuan’s life.  Later, the boats were decorated with the Chinese symbol for many of the good things in life – the dragon – on the bows, so that they were later called dragon boats, thus dragon boat racing.

However, the event has long ceased to memorialize the nobleness of the Chinese patriot-poet Qu Yuan, as much as for the boat people to compete against each other.

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