In the morning I was excited to go to Waka Ama. I changed in my normal clothes instead of my usual school uniform. I played in the playground for a while until the bell rang and for the bus to arrive. It was just us seniors year 7 and 8’s that were going for some reason. Our teachers told us there were going to be 2 Waka’s for our whole group.
We all went by bus and went past Sylvia park arriving at Ian Shaw Park. We sat in the shade to avoid the sun getting in our eyes. We had this kind lady showing us 5 instructions for canoeing. For the start, it was called Easy then, set ’em up, Hoea , Hup and Hold.
The girls were separated from the boys because they both went to a different waka.The Instructor gave us our paddles and we went down to the wharf to our waka. I was in front of the waka along with a teacher and I had to balance to the left side of the waka. When everyone got into the waka we went off and had a little paddle on the lake.
We tried the instructions that our instructor taught us and we were getting pretty good. The other instructor in the boys waka asked our instructor if we wanted to race now and everyone screamed yes. We paddled to the boys who were waiting for us to race them. Since I was in the front me and room 8’s teacher turned the whole waka to the right to make it fair with the boys.
That’s when the race started. We paddled as fast as we could splashing ourselves with water, we didn’t care. We looked straight and both wakas were on the lead I tried so hard I started to get leg cramps to try to keep still. We were almost at the finishing line and we ended up getting a tie!
Since we had a tie we were gonna have another race soon but not now because everyone was exhausted. We practice some strong strokes and how getting the timing right was how you won. I just realized we were way beyond shore and I was getting chills. The instructors thought it was time to race again now.
We came back to the starting line and we stared hard at them letting them know the girls were gonna win. We reminded each other to focus on our timing the most because it was very important if we wanted to win. There was a count down to 3 and we zoomed as fast as we could to try our best. We used our timing and they didn’t. We ended up winning!