Last weekend, during an Indian summer morning in San Francisco, Telstar Logistics spent a morning at Treasure Island watching the action at the 2010 Dragon Boat Festival.
Dragon boat racing has been an annual event in San Francsisco for 15 years, but it's a far cry from rowing crew at Haaaaahvard. For one, the boats really do look like dragons. For another, each boat carries a drummer, who beats a drum to help the rowers synchronize their pace. Let's brush up on some dragon boat fundaments:
A dragon boat (also dragonboat) is a human-powered boat traditionally made of teak wood to various designs and sizes. It is one of a family of Traditional Long Boats found throughout Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands. It is now used in the team paddling sport of dragon boat racing, which originated in China over 2000 years ago. While competition has taken place annually for more than 20 centuries as part of folk ritual, it emerged in modern times as an international sport in Hong Kong in 1976.
The boats were fun and colorful, and the scene at Treasure Island was lovely, not least because the races take place against a superb background: The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and its now-under-construction replacement span.
The race course itself spanned an area of Treasure Island known as Clipper Cove. Though that name sounds like the kind of faux-historic drivel that might have been cooked up by a developer of cookie-cutter tract housing, in this case, it's the real deal. Clipper Cove at Treasure Island really was once home to Clippers -- but they were the flying kind.
Clipper Cove was originally created for Pan American Clippers, the giant flying boats that inagurated the first commercial air service between the United States and China. We wrote about the Clippers a few years ago:
Passengers reached Asia by playing hopscotch across the Pacific, stopping along the way for rest and refueling in Hawaii, the Midway Islands, Wake Island, Guam, and Manila before arriving in Hong Kong... The 8000-mile journey to China took five and one-half days. Tickets cost $1600 per person — roughly $10,000 in contemporary dollars.
Clipper Cove was the San Francisco terminus for Pan American's Transpacific service, while the cove itself served as a sheltered parking lot for the Clipper fleet. Though Clipper service ended with the outbreak of World War II, the area has changed little since those days, so today it really doesn't take much imagination to envision what it must have looked like when it was home to the flying boats.
So today, where the Clippers once departed for China, an annual celebration of Chinese culture now takes place in the form of San Francisco's annual dragon boat races. It's as if the flying boats brought the dragon boats back as souvenirs of their journeys to the Orient.
Photos: Telstar Logistics
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