The Salford Dragon Boat Festival is one of two local open dragon boat festivals, the other being The Chester Dragon Boat Festival.  Set up as open festivals, teams can either support one of the listed charities under the 'charities' tab (in the homepage menu) or nominate a charity of their own.

The 2010 festival was the first open festival at Salford and twelve teams supporting nine different charities met to compete. For each team, this was their first chance at dragon boating, so there was a lot of excitement about the day!

Today's sport involves crews of up to seventeen people (sixteen paddlers and a drummer), the aim being for the whole team to work together in unison, paddling (and drumming) as one in order to get the boat down the course and over the finishing line as fast as possible.

Raced over a distance of around 200 meters, each team was given a minimum of three timed races during the day, which gave the teams ample time to work with the instructors and use dragon boating as a way to develop team building and team trainings.

Once all three qualifying races were completed, each team’s fastest single race time was used for qualification into the Grand Final, which was one last race between the four fastest teams on the day. This was an exciting race to the finish to determine which team would become: Dragon Boat Champions of Salford 2010.

The day started with a Team Captain’s briefing at 10:00 where an outline of the day was covered, as well as useful information for the crews such as toilet locations and catering facilities. Once completed, the first four teams were called up to be briefed. Crew safety is something we take very seriously, so when a team is called to be briefed, every member of that team (regardless of whether they were paddling in the first race or not) had to attend.

The briefing is partly an instruction on the various commands the helm might give and how the team is to respond, partly a safety instruction on how to stop the boat capsizing nd what to do in the event of a capsize and partly a demonstration on paddling technique and getting the best out of the day.