Water, Paddles and big gun

Last weekend Steph asked me to wake up at 7am on a Saturday to go to Putrajaya. Seeing that Steph doesn't usually wake up that early on the weekends I was thinking it should be something good. So I woke up and went for...

Before we can do anything, we first need to get some breakfast. We were suppose to meet up with some of Steph's gym buddies at McDonalds in Taipan but since we were late they left without us. We ended up getting some KFC.

I also had the toasted twister and man it is actually taste pretty good. It is like a wrap with chicken sausage, scrambled egg, hashbrown and pepper. It is like a big breakfast in a wrap. It was a great breakfast I thought. Steph was getting irriated that she was driving over 45 min and she was still in Subang. She passed me her car keys and off we went.

We kinda got lost for a bit but after a few u turns, we found the place. As we walked in, something I would not expect is the atmosphere. When Steph first told me about this, I was thinking it is some local event in Putrajaya and there won't be many people around. However to my surprise it was such a big international event. They even got an Ang Moh to do the commentating and it had a very F1 feel to the atmosphere. What trully shocked me was the amount of overseas participation.

There were teams from Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Phillipines, Australia and even Great Britain. Some of the countries were actually represented by a few teams. There were also alot of independant teams and one of the conditions for me to tag along was to wear something in orange. We were there mainly to be the cheerleaders for the Splashers which were an independant, semi professional team that was competing.

What strikes me about these team is the team spirit attitude and they were going up against tough competitors who are professionals in the sport. The team is mainly made out of women which is another surprising thing. The were cheery bunch of people and even when they didn't win, they got out of the boat and still clapped, congragulated and hugged each other.

After the race, they took sometime to calm down, to dry their gears, get some food and drinks and they had a debrief session. I was there "pat kua" and being a pesky photographer.

We had a great time walking around the place taking pictures and watching the other teams compete with each other. Even this kid was enjoying himself.

Now some pictures of the other teams that were competiting in the competition.

There were quite alot of people cheering their team on and this lady in particular caught my eye

She was quite ghairah and after taking a picture of her, I turned around and something caught my eye which is totally "out of place".

The other thing that needs some noting is how beautiful the control tower, media center, announcer center and also the judge center was. It sticks out majestically very close to the lake and it kinda looks like the Burj Al Arab.

Now we for sure cannot forget the cheerleaders who where there.

Remember how I was saying that it had a F1 atmosphere? Well take a look for yourself and judge.

Need I say more :). One thing I forgot was when we walked into the venue I saw some floating numbers in the water.

I actually thought it was the starting line. However it found out later that it was actually the finishing line. It was quite evident when someone rammed into one of the numbers towards midday.

Over all I had a really great time. I was running around taking pictures and just soaking up the atmosphere. I have to thank Steph for asking me to go because if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't even know about this event. I will hope to be back next year and hopefully the event would be even bigger then this year.