Local paddlers ready for Minocqua Dragon Boat Festival

The seventh annual Minocqua Dragon Boat Festival takes place on Saturday, bringing paddlers from around the Midwest to the northern Wisconsin town.

A local club of dragon boat racers has multiple teams in the event that’s also a fundraiser for the Howard Young Foundation, which supports the Howard Young Medical Center and Aspirus Eagle River Hospital in northern Wisconsin.

The Island City Dragon Boat Club is led by head coach Mike Mondrall. He told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” he’s bringing two local paddlers with him to race on a senior team at the Club Crew World Championships in Italy next month.

“That’s intense competition,” Mondrall said. “That’s the best club teams from all over the world.”

His club has a youth team, women’s team and mixed team that will each race in Minocqua this weekend.

Katie Simonsen paddles and steers on Island City’s mixed team along with her husband. She has two children who will also compete on the club’s youth team.

“It’s a really great community event,” Simonsen told WPR. “It’s a good way to get everybody involved. There’s the youth, there’s the volunteers and it’s just a fun day to get everybody out there on the water.”

Dragon boat racers don’t row, they paddle — facing forward, not backward. Mondrall described the boats as 40-foot canoes with 10 seats, 20 paddlers, a drummer in the front and a steersperson in the back.

The drummer keeps the beat and the pace for the paddlers, a tradition that dates back to the sport’s Chinese origins over 2,000 years ago.

“It’s got a dragon head on the front and a tail on the back,” Mondrall said. “It captures your interest and you want to know more. Then people want to get involved and we get them on the water, we get them going and it’s a good time.”

He spends the colder months of the year in Florida so he can stay on the water year-round and prepare for events like the upcoming world championships.

Wisconsin weather doesn’t hamper the success of Island City, though. They hold their own against clubs from cities of much bigger sizes like Chicago, Tampa and Miami.

Mondrall said the women’s team won first place in a race at the Chicago International Dragon Boat Festival last month and the club’s mixed team was runner-up at the same event by a fraction of a second

For Simonsen and her children, it’s about the fun and the camaraderie that brings the family together.

“The first time they got in the dragon boat, it was something that was very different because the focus wasn’t just on them and how they were working, but it was how they fit with the team,” she said.

That experience, Simonsen said, seemed to stick with them and keeps drawing them back to the sport.

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