Teaching conservation from a dragon boat

At I AM WATER, people sometimes assume our only focus is the ocean itself - the snorkelling, the marine life, the focus on conservation. Of course, that's a huge part of it. But some of the deeper work, the part that shapes how we run and design our programmes, is a particular conviction about how change actually happens: that protecting the ocean and building stronger communities is collective work, and it cannot be done by anyone alone.

That belief is easy to say, but hard to teach. You can't lecture someone into it. So through our Adventure-Based Learning programme, we try to put our trainees in an environment where the lesson is learnt experientially. On Saturday, 8 August, that environment was a dragon boat race!

What Adventure-Based Learning is

Adventure-Based Learning is a free, year-long programme - an accredited NQF Level 4 qualification we run in collaboration with Contour Enviro Group - for young people aged 18 to 35. Over the course of a year, our ABL trainees move through ocean and conservation learning, real workplace experience, and a set of skills designed to help open doors into fields like conservation, education, tourism and sport.

The programme is built on a belief that some things can't be taught within four office walls - that resilience, teamwork and adaptability are learnt by being placed in situations that genuinely ask for them. So we take our trainees out of familiar routines and into nature-based environments, on the water and in the field, where the environment itself does the teaching. The dragon boat morning was one of those situations.

A day out on the water

The Drachen Hari-Yoshi (DHY) Dragon Boat Club welcomed our team to the V&A Waterfront Marina for a morning on the water. It opened gently: a warm welcome, a warm-up, a safety briefing, life jackets and paddles handed round. Then we split into two crews - the Ocean Warriors and the Sea Dragons - and our competitive spirits were ignited!

Each crew was placed in the hands of DHY's coaches, Idries, Suleiman, Raheemah and Ebrahim, who called out the commands and demonstrated the technique. Rather than leaving us to figure it out, DHY paddlers stepped into both boats and paddled alongside our students, correcting a grip, fixing a timing, stroke by stroke. We ran practice laps. We raced each other, friendly and loud. And then came the race!

For the last race, all eighteen of our paddlers piled into a single boat to take on a DHY crew of just eight. We had more than double their number... and we lost - by a long shot! Eight people moving as one team simply outpaced eighteen people moving as eighteen.

What we learnt as a group

Our ABLs are training to do conservation and social development work - work that cannot be carried by one person alone, however capable or committed. The ocean is not protected by a single dedicated individual, and a community does not shift because someone tried hard alone. A dragon boat makes the importance of teamwork and collaboration visible in the space of a single race: effort without synchronicity goes nowhere, and the whole boat feels it the moment one paddler falls out of rhythm.

That is how we think about Adventure-Based Learning, and about our work more broadly. We take people out of their comfort zones into nature-based environments - on the water, in the field - where a lesson cannot be nodded at and forgotten, because the environment itself does the teaching. A dragon boat does not care what you believe about teamwork. It only moves when you do it together.

A nod to the heritage of this sport

Dragon boating carries a heritage far older than the modern sport. Its origins run back more than 2,000 years, to the Pearl River Delta of southern China, where it began as a fertility ritual and a commemoration of the poet Qu Yuan. What survives today is unmistakable: boats crowned with a dragon's head and tail, ten or twenty paddlers seated in pairs, a drummer beating out the rhythm at the bow and a sweep steering from the stern. The sport reached South Africa in 1992, by way of two boats gifted to Cape Town by its sister city, I'lan County in Taiwan.

DHY's own story is the part that speaks most directly to ours. The club was founded in 2008 out of a youth development initiative built to bring at-risk young people from Mitchells Plain into the sport - the same conviction we hold, that outdoor, nature-based experiences can transform a young person's life. From there, DHY became a Cape Town force: winners of local regattas, competitors internationally in Dubai in 2022, and now the backbone of the elite Cape Town Dragon Boat Association Colours Team.

This October, DHY will represent South Africa at the first-ever International Dragon Boat Championship held on African soil, in Uganda - a real milestone for the club and the country. We'll be cheering them the whole way. If you'd like to help send them there, you can support their campaign here.

Mornings like this one aren't a break from our normal ABL programme - they're a huge part of it. We could teach conservation from a classroom, but a young person who has only been told that teamwork matters is not the same as one who has felt a boat refuse to move until eighteen people found a single rhythm. That's why we keep taking our trainees out of the office and onto the water, into the field, into places that ask something real of them.

And these experiences do more than teach. They widen a sense of what's possible for our trainees. Through our programme, many of our ABL group step into new worlds - a dragon boat, a marine reserve, a working conservation site - they might never have encountered otherwise, and in doing so they meet new mentors, new skills, and a version of themselves they hadn't yet met. That is the work underneath the qualification: not just preparing young people for careers in conservation and social development, but showing them they belong in those spaces too.