BS Season 2011 – BananaShip Dragon Boat Club

2nd Annual BANANASHIP End of Season Dinner

bananaship — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:47:01 +0000

On the night of July 29th, BananaShip capped off their successful 2011 season with their Annual End of Season Dinner. This year’s venue was at Restaurant L’Evidence in the heart of the Plateau. Our Bananas went all out for this event, with everyone undeniably dressed to impress. A tradition also started last year was the BananaShip Awards, where members nominate and vote for their fellow teammates in different categories. This year, the BananaShip awards were even bigger, new awards were created to reflect the many personalities in the club, speeches were delivered by past winners, and even a BananaShip cake made its appearance. It was a night full of celebration to top off a terrific season.

BananaShip would like to applaud its organisers for their hard work making this season a success, and a big thanks to friends & family of BananaShip for your continued support. We hope to see everyone in 2012. Below is the list of award winners along with pictures from the evening.

BANANASHIP HONORARY AWARDS
Most Banana Award (Lifetime Recognition): Stephanie Wong & Amanda Lo
Most Honorary Banana (Lifetime Recognition): Jennifer Sakai (2010 Honorary Banana)
Honorary Banana Award 2011: Wilson Li

BANANASHIP PERFORMANCE AWARDS
Most Improved Veteran 2011: James Vu (Most Improved Rookie 2010)
Most Improved Rookie 2011: Hee Won Yoon & John Kha
Never Give Up Award 2011: Izzadmaher Satoudian

BANANASHIP ATTITUDE AWARDS
Presence Award 2011: Edward Trinh
Yoda Award 2011: Philippe Pham
Blabbermouth Award 2011: Pui Tak Chan (Never Give Up Award 2010)

BANANASHIP EXECUTIVE AWARDS
The Captains’ Selection: Izzadmaher Satoudian
The Coach’s Selection: Angus Kwan & Ed Nguyen (Presence Award 2010)

BANANASHIP 2011 CAPTAINS PLAQUES
Merica Pin-Fo Chen (Most Banana Award 2010) & Amanda Phoenix Lo

BS Season 2011 – July Pt.2 – Montreal Festival Weekend

bananaship — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 03:27:14 +0000

Day 1: We arrived at the basin Friday mid-day to compete in the Hong Kong Student Cup, which we won Silver last year. And new this year, there was also the Tourism Cup taking place in the 10’s boats. Quite exciting for the student teams that were there. BananaShip was placed in the B Final. Hoping to be the top team, you can imagine how disappointed we were. But we took the ranking in good stride, and dominated it, taking first by a long-shot in Final B of Student Cup.

Day 2: For many rookies, Saturday was their first chance to experience the festive atmosphere the Montreal Festival had to offer. Free sponsored pizza, free sponsored deodorant (yes, free deodorant) and lots of fun and games at the Nintendo and CTV tent. In the afternoon our resident dancers King & Raymond along with Project B performed for the crowd on the grand stage! Great day of races, stinky tofu, and mascots galore. By the end of the day, BananaShip Comp has finally reached Premier category, Extreme at top of the Rookie divisions. Razor Lemon has placed in Open D, and our Femmes in Women G.

Day 3: After a tiring two days of racing at the 16th Annual Montreal International Dragon Boat Festival, our boys dug deep on the third and final day to capture Razor Lemon’s first ever medals. Our Lemons commanded the 500m & 200m finals in the Open D division, raising BananaShip’s 2011 medal tally to 3. Our Femmes Fatales took home 2nd Place in the Women G division. BananaShip Comp had an uphill struggle, competing with some of the best teams at the fest in the Premier D category, placing 6th. Our Extreme team took 4th place in Rookie A! Overall, a great way to finish our last race of the season. What did we do to celebrate? By stuffing our faces with burger and poutine, pure gluttony!

Big thanks to Stefy’s parents for providing lunch and AutoKlaw for the cold refreshments during the weekend. We really appreciate it!

BS Season 2011 – July Pt.1 – BananaShip Academy

bananaship — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 02:57:07 +0000

We came up with an idea, why not teach our paddlers the basics by taking videos of us paddling? Within a day, this crazy idea became reality. Here are the first 3 lessons, bloopers, and Tug-a-War. Enjoy!

BS Season 2011 – June Pt.2 – Ottawa Festival Weekend

bananaship — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 02:56:58 +0000

Ottawa Festival! For the first time in 5 years, BananaShip finally had a competition outside of Montreal. It was a eye opener for the team and it helped us all build a better chemistry. We arrived on Friday night at the Embassy Suite, 3 rooms, one boys room, one girls room and one mixed room.

Day 1 – Friday night was calm, Xiao’s car and Lawrence’s car left early, Merica, Tatiana and Mary’s cars came after work and arrived by 10pm.

Day 2 – Competition Day, we woke up at 5:15am, Phil flew in at 3:00am from Vancouver to join us, and the boys room woke up at 4:00am! Everyone was ready in the parking lot by 6:45am. Our first 500m race was judged as being “not so good” by the team, I personally thought it was alright, it was our first race in a different city, different water. We had a bad start, but we caught up well. During the second 500m, we discussed about the corrections to be made and shaved off 5 seconds of our time, I was happy about that. At the end of the day, we had a nice team dinner with Peking duck and a lot of T&T grocery. The team also got me an awesome gift! That was quite a surprise, although I did wonder why Pui Sum picked up a cake and when I asked her she just ran away from me. We had booze, the Stephs were obsessed with Palm Bay Pineapple vodka spritz. I have to admit they are pretty good.

BS Season 2011 – June Pt.1

bananaship — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 04:50:30 +0000

Bananaship is coming in together very nicely. Today was really fun! we almost had a full boat of women! impressive! and they were really good and synchronized too. The men were having fun singing backstreet boys.. oh boy!

For Ottawa team? Hmm we’ll have to see, right now it seems just okay, there seems to be a lack of chemistry and a few obstacles for us to overcome but I’m positive it will come together when we get closer to the competition. For the Ottawa Team to become better, we will need more focus, the boat just didn’t seem to go as fast as expected or as controlled as I would’ve liked it to be. We still have time, so let’s keep working hard.

Overall the club is just doing so well! We might get get our gear ready for Ottawa and definitely ready for Summer Splash.

I’m a little worried about the League event this year, but we’ll have at least 3 teams so it’s okay.

Bananaship will collaborating with Paddle for the cure to form Phil’s Femmes Fatales for Summer Splash! Can’t wait!

Hopefully we can get a few pics on sunday!

BS Season 2011 – May Pt.6 – H2O Open

bananaship — Sun, 29 May 2011 00:48:43 +0000

BananaShip competed in its first H2O Open and ranked 12th out of 18 community teams. The bar has certainly been raised at the basin, time for us to train harder!

BS Season 2011 – May Pt.5 – Night Before the First Competition

bananaship — Sat, 28 May 2011 04:49:00 +0000

The weather was cold and very windy today! But the club surprisingly got almost two full boats in during practice! To say that we used to struggle waiting for only one boat to happen. The challenge has been brought up a notch now. The organizers are getting ready for tomorrow’s competition, our first appearance at the H2O Open. How will we do? We’ll do our best! Surprises are sure to come.

There were 3 new try-outs tonight, the team was quite distracted and stressed out because it was time to get serious. You really have to love competition and be able to take criticism to be on the team. A lot of veterans came back to visit us! It’s always great to see them back and see how much they’ve changed! From innocent newbies to today, giving back to the club and teaching the new generation how to paddle.

Let’s put it this way, our philosophy is first to have fun, gain leadership roles and maintain the club as a company. We are athletes, but also quite business oriented I must say. Winning competitions comes with team spirit, generosity and kindness to share with others.

What can I say more, this is a dream team and we made it! Great people helping each other to develop the sport! It’s very close to teaching a lifestyle. Whenever I get too tough into “winning & winning”, other members remind me that this is fun! I hope all goes well tomorrow; that we are silly, having a blast and ready to take a challenge as a team! Bring it on!

BS Season 2011 – May Pt.4 – Getting Ready for H2O Open!

bananaship — Thu, 26 May 2011 13:06:40 +0000

We got a last minute call from Jimmy and turns out we were able to participate in a competition happening this Saturday! We had exactly one day to make up the roster and have all the people notified. 24 hours later… We have ourselves a full team! Overloaded too!

This season is going to be legendary, I’m saying this because we have a great executive team, Amanda is a great addition she’s very proactive and extremely bright. We also have a lot of help from the team, Izzy has been leading warm-ups, King is ready to train the league teams, Natalie will be helping out with bagging. I’m pretty sure we will bring it up a notch once again. In 2008, we made a new design to our T-shirts, that has become our signature T-shirt today. In 2009, the new captains kept it well with a lot of successful fundraisers. In 2010, we boomed! From just 1 team to 4; building not only BananaShip Competitive and Extreme, but also 2 gendered teams: Phil’s Femme Fatales and Razor Lemon 2.0 – the remake of “BananaShip 2007”.

What will we be adding this year? At the B-Shop, we are now selling sweatpants, duffle bags, sunshine and lapis hoodies, as well as our signature T-shirts. The club is excited to receive the apparel this year because we’ll be wearing everything proudly to Ottawa on June 17th.

Isabelle, King, Ed and a lot of other members have been working very hard in promoting our different events such as our BBQ Extravaganza: KABOOM! (June 22nd). Be sure to attend! Isabelle and Ed are doing a hot-dog eating contest! Oh boy, oh boy.

I’ll let you know about H2O Open, the rosters are set, and since it’s the first competition, I’d like us to start on the right foot and do well. For that, Friday’s going to be one very strict lesson to all the members. It’s time to get to work!

BS Season 2011 – May Pt.3 – 5th Year!

bananaship — Tue, 24 May 2011 02:42:19 +0000

The first few weeks are always rocky, but things always work out for the best!

Amanda came back from Toronto, everyone is back, we are now overloaded with over 24 guys and making it to the 20 girls!!! This is incredibly exciting!

This season will be a blast! Especially as our 5th season! Even Celebrity Apprentice hasn’t made it this far! Stay tuned for some internal gossip starting next week. I will be sure to pay close attention to the “love” tension in the team and tell you about it! It usually starts with Phil crushes, or PT love…but now… wonder if there is anything real going on in the team!

Good luck to everyone who’s busy busy in school! CFA exams, wisdom teeth removals, summer classes… and to those students who are taking stats class this summer!

BS Season 2011 – May Pt.2 – Rocky Start of the Season!

bananaship — Tue, 24 May 2011 02:34:00 +0000

Where to begin, the start of our 5th season has been extremely rough! Not the most joyful nor smoothest. Merica now has a job in St-Hyacinthe, a 2hrs to drive back to Montreal every week-end. Amanda had family matters, and was in Toronto for a few weeks. Lawrence, James, Tak are busy with school. Unfortunately, Allan won’t be coming back too often this year, he is stuck doing residency in Texas, Queensland, a land of 600 people with no technology, no communication for 8 weeks. Bucketman landed a job in Ottawa, Britt to Cuba, and Stephanie is getting her wisdom teeth taken out. (Ouch!)

That’s life as adults. What else happened… A lot of paddlers won’t be returning this season because of prior commitments; Jenn Ji will be in Boston for a summer internship, Victoria trekking, and Tony PhDing… we hope they will come visit us.

Now enough with the negative energy! There was a positive twist to our rocky start. It wasn’t all bad! A LOT of old BANANAS came back!!! Natalie, Mary, David and a lot of new additions! By a lot we mean a WHOLE lot! Edward, Jorge, John, Guillaume, Raymond, Kathryn, Huy- Dang and many more! Welcome to BANANASHIP!