A boat race without water? Only in Alice Springs

The annual Alice Springs dry riverbed boat race was held over the weekend, with the full suite of singles, doubles, quads, eights, water skis, gunboats, and mini and maxi yachts all standing off (literally) for the desert edition of the Henley Royal Regatta.

“We’ve had to cancel our boat race only once because we had water in the river,” commodore (chairman for business purposes) of the Henley on Todd Regatta Dominic Miller told Crikey.

Now in its 61st year, the waterless boating event began with a parade in town and finished true to form with a three-boat (Vikings v Pirates v Navy) water and flour bomb gunfight in the Todd River.

Miller said that in the 40 years he’s been running the show, they’ve managed to emulate 20-gram gunpowder charges using a healthy combination of wheat husks (pollard powder) and coloured chalk. The jazzed-up flour bombs are individually detonated in the centre of the arena, as crew-laden ships on wheels roll around with 1000 to 2000 litres of water on hand to drench opponents.

“You get pulverised,” he said.

While these ships have the luxury of wheels, the remainder of the event is filled with bottomless boats. Participants take to the sand in either custom-fit (BYO) or event-edition vessels and run rings on the riverbed track.

This year’s winner of the BYO boating event was a team of four local doctors — Michael Nielson, Ramana Waran, Sam McLaren and Lucy Bek — that went by “Rain-boats”. Opting for speed and agility, they angled for an ultra-lightweight and exceptionally buoyant boat build using pool noodles.

Nielson told Crikey that their victory was due to a combination of “genetic and environmental factors” — ample leg room that gave the crew space to stride and a strict intake and training regimen.

“Basically, I want to do sport with other people, and they say no. So I go running by myself,” Nielson said.

“As for today, I’ve had two chocolate thickshakes, a couple of beers, and some butter chicken. It’s the diet of an elite athlete.”

The team placed second last year but following an engineering and aerodynamic audit and update, the Rain-boats this year took home first place. They were up against a submarine, a houseboat (filled with real estate agents), a Flintstones mobile, an anti-fracking vessel, a Yes to the Voice craft and a few sinkers that crossed the finish line in a state of disarray.

Since the inaugural regatta in 1962 (dreamt up by the late meteorologist Reg Smith to serve as a fundraiser for the Alice Springs Rotary Club), the event has remained relatively unchanged, give or take a few categories. Miller said that both the “Miss Henley on Todd” and “7.5-metre greasy pole race” (where five to six people would pile on top of each other to retrieve bottles of liquor on hooks at the top) no longer pass the pub test.

“The first guy would stand by the pole, grabbing it. The second person would jump on his shoulders, the third person on the shoulders of the second person, the fourth person on the shoulders of the third and so on, until we get to five people, or six if they were short,” Miller said.

“It was a chiropractor’s nightmare. Now we’re a little more OH and S aware.”

The competitor profile has also evolved to 50:50 locals-to-tourists. That includes a large cohort of US personnel from the Pine Gap military base and, this year, a small Canadian team that Miller described as the “Canadian equivalent of NORFORCE”.

In a standard year, the regatta attracts a crowd of approximately 4500, but Miller said tourism in Alice Springs is down courtesy of media coverage so numbers this year have taken a hit.

Those who were in attendance were unphased by the trying conditions of a waterless boat race: “No water? We haven’t seen water in years,” Nielson said. “Tomorrow we start practising for next year.”