Eight groups of paddlers took part in dragon boat races on Central Lake on Saturday, officially bringing dragon boat racing to Eastport for the first time. Four teams — the Blue Broncos, Orange Outlaws, Red Renegades and Purple Prospectors — fielded eight vessels total, each crewed by 20 paddlers, a steersman and a drummer, as hundreds of spectators lined the town square, the boardwalk next to Hotel Eastport and the shores of Sunset Island to watch.
The event, dubbed the dragon boat rodeo, opened with a ceremonial march from Sunset Island to the center of Eastport, where an opening ceremony began at 8 a.m., according to Villages-News.com. Each team marched in behind a fellow Villager dressed in full dragon costume, setting a festive tone before the real competition got underway. Racing itself didn’t start until after a dotting of the eye ceremony, a ritual meant to symbolically awaken the dragon and bring safety and good luck to the paddlers, per the same report.
Three Races, One New Lake
Once the ceremonial portion wrapped up, crews competed in three distinct events: the posse pursuit, traditional dragon boat races and the lighthearted chicken race. The races made use of Central Lake, a body of water that construction crews dug specifically as part of Eastport’s development — the kind of groundwork John Rohan, director of recreation for The Villages, said culminated years of planning and construction at Eastport.
Rohan thanked the Villages Recreation and Parks team for its work bringing the event together, along with local veterans, and specifically called out Jack Dody and Andrew Esposito by name for their roles in the effort. Volunteers, he and others noted, had put in hundreds and hundreds of hours organizing the rodeo long before the first boat ever touched the water.
A Club Milestone Years in the Making
For Cheryl Moran, president and self-described “mayor” of the dragon boat group, Saturday’s rodeo marked her club’s first official event on the newly dug lake. She expressed gratitude to everyone involved in what she described as a multi-year process, and she praised the collaboration between her club and the Villages district as nothing short of monumental. Moran also gave a special shoutout to Bobby and Mike Kirkman, and to a volunteer named Pam, while crediting vendors who supplied team shirts and boats for the day’s races and praising the level of local government support behind the project.
The Recreation and Parks division’s first dragon boat represents a milestone for the community — the division says it is the first Dragon Boat it has owned and operated itself. Built by Pan-American Dragon Boat, the division describes the craft as designed and built by a Villager, for Villagers — a detail that underscores just how homegrown this corner of the sport has become.
Part of a Nearly Two-Decade-Old Scene
Dragon boat racing is no newcomer to The Villages. The sport has been a popular competitive pastime in the community for nearly 20 years, with roughly 400 active paddlers currently taking part, according to the Recreation and Parks division. The Eastport Sun Dragons is a competitive race team based at the Central Lake venue.
Grand Masters oversees nine boats across The Villages and makes them available to teams, handling safety, scheduling, maintenance, insurance and overall logistics for the sport locally. Its competitive squads travel to races throughout the Southeast and sometimes farther afield, the club says.
The Villages isn’t alone in the region when it comes to dragon boat culture. The Lake County Dragon Boat Club, founded in 2008 by Mount Dora resident and coach Grace Genetia, had scheduled its own race off Ski Beach in Leesburg for May 18, 2024, organized alongside its Wun Fun Cru team with races set to start at 9 a.m., according to a Mid Florida Newspapers report. That same Wun Fun Cru crew has earned a spot representing the United States at the International Dragon Boat Federation’s Club Crew World Championship in Ravenna, Italy, a sign of how competitive the regional paddling scene has become beyond just The Villages.
