The second annual Chicago Southland Dragon Boat Festival on Saturday in Blue Island will offer a spectacular display of teamwork and synchronization, fest organizers said.
When this year’s festival gets started at 9:45 a.m. on the Cal-Sag, it will showcase the collaborative spirit of paddlers who pull together during this fun competition.
The daylong event includes dragon boat races, jumping into Cal-Sag, a craft beer village and music with from These Old Men They Play Records. There also will be an after-party at the Blue Island Beer Company on Old Western Avenue.
The festival will be held at the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s (MWRD) waterfall park at Chatham and Fulton streets, and is free and open to the public.
“The dragon boat races are so visually spectacular. It’s all about synchronization,” said Sara Brown, who has organized the event with her husband Kevin Brown. “This is a great spot to view the races. It’s not about being the strongest. It’s all about teamwork.”
This year’s event so far has 14 teams of 21 — up from eight teams last year, said Brown, who also participated in last year’s event.
The Browns, who lead the Blue Island Development Company (BIDCo), a business and community development partnership, wanted to make it more of a festival by showcasing more of what the city has to offer with more vendors, she said.
In order to expand the event, it was moved from Fay’s Point Marina to the MWRD park, a larger, more accessible site, according to the Browns.
The Browns had help this year from the Chicago Southland Convention and Visitors Bureau, Friends of the Cal-Sag Trail and Friends of The Chicago River, which held a volunteer cleanup effort at the park and adjacent lots as part of their annual Chicago River Day celebration.
“We’re proud to partner with the Browns, our businesses, organizations, officials and residents to make events like this happen in Blue Island,” said Blue Island Mayor Domingo Vargas in a news release. “We’re all pulling from the same end of the rope, and by combining our efforts, we’re able to shine an even brighter spotlight on all the things that make Blue Island special.”
Dragon boat racing draws people together, Sara Brown said
“My husband and I are lovers of Blue Island and the Southland. We wanted to bring business and government together with the MWRD and neighborhood people and host this beautiful day in Blue Island,” she said. “It’s an example of what we can do on a larger scale by working together to make Blue Island and the Southland as wonderful as we know it is.”
Brown gives credit to the Chicago Southland Convention and Visitors Bureau for having the “vision” to create the first festival last year.
”We want to demonstrate that when we work together can make some fun and unique things happen,” she said.
The dragon boat race is an “ancient Chinese activity” held in honor of a fallen leader, Brown said. It features teams of 21 — 20 paddlers plus one seated in front, beating on a drum.
In the Blue Island event, each race is about 250 meters, or 90 seconds long, and each team competes three times. Novices can compete with very little training or instruction, and participants can do exercises to prepare for it, Brown said, adding that some teammates are meeting for the first time on race day.
Trophies are awarded in three divisions — professional, amateur and community. The Blue Island event is one of three dragon boat races in the Chicago area, with two others in Chicago’s Chinatown and Arlington Heights, Brown said.
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