Miniature Dragon Boats

How do you fit 22 people inside?

Aaron Perkins is living the dream. He gets to do what he loves for a living. Perkins, a former member of Singapore’s American Dragon Boat Team and Team Arashi, turned his love for paddling into his own business. He is the proprietor of Mini Dragon Boat.com, a company that makes plastic scale-model dragon boats that are 20 inches long from head to tail.

Perkins’ story began with a business trip. “My day job, market research, sent me to Singapore to our office there for six months to work on a project,” Perkins recalled. “In my lead-up research about the country and what I was going to be doing there, I came across a TV show that discussed Singapore and how dragon boating is basically their national sport.” Upon arrival, Perkins met some paddlers from the American Dragon Boat Team at a bar one night. He expressed interest in trying the sport out, went to practice the next week and “pretty much loved it from the start.”

Perkins paddled with the American team in Singapore for the duration of his stay. During this period, Perkins’s father asked him to bring home a miniature dragon boat as a souvenir. Despite his best efforts, Perkins was unable to find anything that matched his father’s request. “I went around to the different festivals and asked people if they had ever seen one and found that it just didn’t exist.”

Unfortunately, Perkins had to return home empty handed. His father then offered some life-changing advice. He said, “If they don’t exist then you should make them.” This wisdom prompted Perkins to conduct more research. He concluded there was a “good-sized market and demand” for miniature dragon boats. Perkins then consulted with manufacturing experts and got a prototype made. He then took the prototype to a couple of festivals to gauge interest. “The response,” Perkins said, “was through the roof!” Encouraged, Perkins then secured funding and began his new venture, which sold 163 miniatures in its first year.

Perkins’s miniatures are realistic and detailed. A close look reveals true-to-life features including a functional oar lock, a drummer’s station and paddles. “I digitally scanned a full-size boat that my team uses for practice to achieve the accuracy you can see,” Perkins stated. He made some slight changes, however, to make the design work for the plastic injection molding system used in the manufacturing process. Perkins also made some cosmetic changes. Although the hulls of his miniatures are realistically proportioned, “the head and tail would be too small if they were kept to scale so I enlarged them a little to make them look better,” Perkins explained. This effort resulted in the creation of a model kit like ones sold in hobby stores.

Although some of his customers choose to assemble their boats, most ask Perkins to do the work. “Once the raw boat is made I assemble and paint them by hand,” he noted. Perkins then decorates the assembled boats with customized graphics. “The dragon scale decals were designed by me and are now produced by another company. Then, I make and print each team name decal from scratch at home and apply.”

The company’s customers are paddlers “from all over the world.” “I have sold boats from Wisconsin to Australia and everywhere in between,” Perkins, a resident of Milwaukee, WI, stated. “Germany loves dragon boating, and I have sold many to them. I’m doing an order right now for a Singapore team.”

Perkins feels his customers buy his miniatures because they are “passionate about their sport, but so few people know what [dragon boat racing] is.” Perkins went on to explain that “when you have a mini version of your boat sitting on your desk or hanging on your wall you can point to it and say, ‘This is what I do all those weekends I am away!’”

Perkins enjoys running the business because it provides him with a “feeling of creativity, passion and accomplishment all at the same time. The creativity of helping teams design logos to fit the boat, passion of making a hobby a job, and the accomplishment of making something that people really enjoy.” This passion helped him double sales last year. Perkins has plans to expand his product line to include mini dragon boat paddles and dragon head key chains.

For more information about miniature dragon boats, go to minidragonboat.com.

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PADDLING PROFILE

DF: Do you paddle with a team? Which one?

AP: I paddled with the American team in Singapore for the whole six months I was there. When I came to the states I figured I would never get to do something exotic like that again and was disappointed. But figured I would Google it to see if there was any dragon boating in the area. I live in Milwaukee, WI so I assumed it was a long shot. To my surprise I found there were several annual dragon boat races in Wisconsin alone. I found the closest to me which was in Racine, WI. I looked up last year’s winner of the festival and asked if they needed paddlers. The team name is Arashi. I joined up, got several of my friends to join as well, and we have been doing it since 2010. Have won several championships and placed in just about every race we do. Our coach just got selected to coach the Canadian national Over-50 team for the Dragon Boat WorldChampionship next year.

Unfortunately with the demand of the business I was not able to race last year but hope to get back into it this year.

DF: What do you like about dragon boat paddling?

AP: I love being on a boat cutting through the water with a group of like-minded people striving for the same goal. Those moments when you are taking a small break and just gliding along, silently as your hand or paddle dip into the water, there is nothing like it. I love the competition, the people you meet, and winning!

DF: Do you have any memorable racing/practice stories?

AP: My favorite race and event in general, is the annual Lake Superior Dragon Boat Festival held in August in Superior, WI. It’s held on an island in the lake that overlooks the skyline of Duluth, MN across the bay. Great setting. There are over 100 teams that participate from the U.S. and Canada. Very competitive and a great atmosphere with a hotel full of dragon boaters that party hard after the race, including drunken adult slip and slide, which is an annual thing. I believe it was in 2010 we had only one race at the beginning of the year, as two got canceled, so we trained basically all summer for the late August race in Superior. We were definitely underdogs coming in to it. Barely made the final race by like two-tenths of a second. We were the last team to place in the finals. It was a beautiful day and everything just lined up for us. We pulled out a victory by two or three tenths of a second, a photo finish between all four boats. It was so exhilarating to get our first gold medal, and out of 100 plus teams. We then went on to repeat the following year.

The Lake Superior race is amazing, and I highly recommend it for a world class event as I have been to several around the U.S. and Singapore.

San Francisco Bay Area Dragon Boat Team DieselFish offers free dragon boat lessons. Email us at dfcaptains@gmail.com now for details!