Our History
The history of the Blast project is quite a fun little journey. It all started with a paddler in Sydney, Australia, who took an idea and gave it a life, and continues to drive that idea from formation to realisation, and over an almost three year journey now, has fed that idea on a daily basis, seeing it grow to a shared ideal that is taking root across the world.
Why isn’t there a local event for punters like me
As a member of a team that participated in the world famous Avon Descent, a two day paddle down a flooded river near Perth, in Western Australia, the idea arose that there wasn’t really an event on Sydney harbour that the average “punter” ( aka novice ) could participate in without enduring the scorn of old school paddlers, cliques that frowned on the new breed of paddler and their new toys, or punters who didn’t want to paddle 100+ km over two days to prove they had what it takes, but just wanted to jump on the water for an hour or so and see what they could do, without having to join a club, pay regular membership fees, but just rock up and have a crack at the clock and some fellow amateur paddlers who shared a similar passion for recreational paddling.
Endorphin high at the 2008 Avon Descent
Having rediscovered the paddling bug, an IT geek by the name of Dez Blanchfield on the flight back from the 2008 Avon Descent ( riding on the high of having been part of a four man team who won their division, brain pumped full of adrenalin and endorphins ) found himself wondering why there wan’t a regular paddling event of some form in his back yard, Sydney harbour, he could take part in, as an amateur paddler.
The locals weren’t always friendly
There were a couple of well established Time Trials around Sydney, and a number of existing annual race events, but or a newcomer to paddle sport, the existing Time Trials were not as easy to break into for someone still struggling to stay upright on a kayak or surf ski, and the big name events were well out of reach still.
Having made the trip to both the local time trials, giving them a go, and finding the experience a learning journey but not quite what it was anticipated to be, the desire to build something for entry level paddlers continued to take shape.
The birth of the Blast at 40,000 feet
So somewhere around the half way mark between Perth and Sydney, the idea to kick off a regular low key event, ideally weekly, run to a basic time trial format, took form. The idea had been discussed a couple of times while sitting in the back of the team SUV the weekend of the 2008 Avon Descent – and names were even thrown around. A local running event called the “Balmoral Burn” came up and I think it was a friend by the name of Simon Gould who threw out the idea of using something like Bang or Blast, and it stuck.
So by the time Dez had returned to Sydney, the idea of a Balmoral Blast had started to take form, and a week after getting back to Sydney, emails were bouncing back and forth with the idea that “someone should start something out of Balmoral”. But like all good ideas, nobody seemed to want to take the lead. So the decision that put this entire project into play was made, and Dez replied to a group email to around 40 paddlers asking for a show of hands to see who would turn up if he kicked off a regular local time trial.
It had to start somewhere
The very first Blast ever established was at Balmoral Beach, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It was called the Balmoral Blast, and that name has come to be known by so many paddlers as the beginning of something great. Who would have thought something so simple could turn into something so great.
35 brave paddlers turned out for Balmoral Blast #1
The first event saw some 35 paddlers turn out on surf ski’s, outrigger canoes, kayaks, and plastic sit on tops, all eager and keen and wondering what it was all about. The first event was a fun little gathering, and ran better than expected.
Tip #1 – Don’t log the wall clock times
The initial timing was actually done by friend of Dez’s who didn’t even paddle, Brett Swinney, who learned the hard way that logging times for a race event with the start time and finish time as what was on the wall clock ( i.e. started at 7:23am and finished at 8:45am ) and doing the math to calculate the individual times with a pen and paper was a lot less fun sitting on a beach than it seemed the night before when Dez convinced him to do it.
We literally turned up at Balmoral beach with a fold up table, a wooden bench, and a digital LED wall clock, a clip board ( everyone knows you need a clip board if you’re going to run something – you can rule the world with a clip board and the right attitude ), we made it as we went, and boy did we learn some fun hard lessons from day one. But it was fun, and we were building something so many people wanted to be part of – it had to be good.
There had to be a better way
It was pretty clear after a couple of weeks of running the Balmoral Blast with a pen, pad and a spanky new stop watch one of the crew Kevin Hopko had donated to the project, and with a few nights spent researching available timing systems and race management systems, it quickly became clear ( Dez survives on around 3 to 4 hours sleep most nights so when we say the topic was researched, you can bet it was thoroughly and exhaustively research as humanly possible ) that there had to be a better way to do this whole race management and timing “stuff”.
There were a number of geeks in the crew, and the idea was discussed by a number of the crew – the idea to build a system to suit our needs was born, and a couple of the crew took the challenge on. Between Dez and one other of the crew who also had a lifetime background in IT, an initial system was quickly built and was put into use very early on.
Shoe string & bubble gum
Like all such projects, the initial version was a mish-mash of ideas and hacks that “did the job”, held together by shoe string and bubble gum, it did the job, but before long it started to have some issues, and needed some further work, but the idea was good and it was clear that there was a simple way to build a system that could make it much simpler to manage and run race events, and the Blast Race Management System was born.
Hey, there’s a commercial opportunity here
One of the crew who saw the opportunity to take the idea further and commercialise it on their own, decided to go out and build the original system with the aim to commercialise it and offer it at a price. Before long two others from the original group of paddlers followed and a separate project was established to build a business around the basic idea, but unfortunately it didn’t go anywhere.
Time to go build a better widget
The challenge then was to build a system that took everything we had learned from building – so Dez sat down at his macintosh laptop and with the aid of countless hot mugs of Milo, and nine days and nights with almost no sleep, a completely new system was built from scratch and was put into use immediately and the darn thing worked.
Over the two years that have followed since that crazy nine day marathon code hacking session, the system has continued to grow and develop, into what is now one of the easiest to use yet most very powerful Race Management System available.
The Blast RMS now powers time trials and race events around the world almost every day of the week, all year long, and is made available to clubs and paddling groups at no cost to get established, and at a nominal cost to help support the ongoing growth and development of the Blast project. The system hosts tens of thousands of paddlers and thousands of races, and scales from little time trials of a dozen paddlers at a time, through to events of hundreds, or even thousands of entrants. It undergoes constant development and refinement and to quote Dez “if you can write it down in plain English, I’ll develop it for you” – you get the picture.
So who is this Dez guy
Dez is really just your everyday guy ( oh ok, so that’s not entirely correct, he’s a freak, but the best kind of freak ), he’s an easy going happily married 43 year old father of two, who grew up in the jungles of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon islands, in particular Bougainville island, where the first 14 years of his life were spent in the dense jungle in the mountains for PNG or Bougainville, or on the beach fronts of the pristine waters of pacific island life.
Paddling was actually a large part of life in the Solomon islands, a hollowed out log with an outrigger called a “lakatoi” was the usual mode of transport for the locals, and untold miles were clocked up as a kid either fishing, surfing the reef breaks or just venturing around with the locals, so it’s not so surprising that the paddling bug bit Dez so deep once he got back on a canoe or kayak of some form.
Repeat after me – everything is a race
Having taken the mantra “everything is a race” very much to heart, and not being content with sitting atop a big fat “sit on top” plastic tub kaky chasing the local legend iron man Guy Leech around Sydney harbour in order to get fit and loose weight, having seen the ultra fit guys & girls flying past the training squad paddling the kayak equivalent of a Formula 1 racing car, otherwise know as an Ocean Racing surf ski, or even the Surf Life Saving “specification” surf skis ( aka Spec Ski ), the desire to master and own one of these racing ski’s didn’t take long to take seed.
Jump in the deep end
It wasn’t log before a surf ski was purchased, in fact it was Dez’s wife who gave him his first surf ski, as a birthday gift. She may not have know the repercussion of such a brash move but it was the start of something that shaped the lives of everyone around Dez and that story has only just begun.
True to form, rather than sit in the shallows like everyone else and figure out how to stay on top of this shiny new paddling machine, Dez wobbled around to the messiest bit of water on Sydney harbour, know as “middle head” and spend three days falling off, getting back on, cursing, and eventually discovering the most efficient way to fall in, get back on, and stay on top of an ocean racing surf ski.
How skinny can they make a surf ski
This is a quest that seems to now consume Dez, and the journey from a Plastic sit on top “tub” to a fibreglass Fenn XT, carbon fibre Fenn Mako 6, and then the ultimate in ultra high performance ocean racing surf ski’s, the 8.5kg carbon fibre Think Uno surf ski, a 6.5 meter long, pencil thin, feather light screaming machine, was a very short and rapidly consumed mere two year journey that saw our fearless leader make the migration from “plastic tub” to one of the most “tippy” surf ski’s money can buy in record time – yep, he’s nothing if not competitive, even with himself.
How to you contact Dez
That’s easy, he has to be one of the most “connected” individuals on the planet, both “network” wise, and in communication means. Dez Blanchfield. If you can’t contact this guy, then you’re probably dead, as there’s so many ways to reach out and touch him that it’s bordering on ridiculous.
The paddler who never sleeps
Don’t be surprised to find yourself on the web, on email, Facebook and Twitter and see messages going out through every one of those mediums from the founder of the Blast project, and don’t be surprised if the timestamp of the emails or Twitters are at some ungodly hour, he almost never sleeps ( Dez is often quoted as saying “Sleep is like little pockets of Death, and frankly when I die, I’ll get around one or two billion years of sleep, but until then, I’ll avoid it like the plague” – you get the idea ).
So if you’re looking to reach out and get in touch with Dez, one of these touch points should do the job:
- Email: Dez@BlastPaddlers.COM
- Phone: +61 414 464 356
- Skype: dez_blanchfield
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/dez.blanchfield
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/dez_blanchfield
- Viber: 0414 464 356
