As I arrive at school I think to my self “How weird is it to be a school at 7 am?”. It is cold and dark, I can’t see anyone. I jump out of the car and have a look around. I soon find them. Once everyone has got together we hop into the school van and begin our journey to Taupo. It was quite a good trip with only one quick stop at the gas station for food and drinks.
We walk into the hall, we are late. There is a quick talk introducing the leaders and then we are harnessed up and off to climb. All hoping we got to climb easy walls, we get informed that we can only climb one colour. One by one we climb, we had only three minutes to get as high as we could. We got to climb two walls and then we could go off for free time before our finals. Most of us went for a swim. I had to climb second and I could tell from almost everyones faces they were nervous. It didn’t take very long for the finals to finish but to me it felt like forever as each person went up and came down. Around 5 minutes after the finals we had prize giving. Over all our school did really well we got second in both year 7 and 8 over all team scores. We got gold in year 7 boys William Esterman, year 7 girls Eden Faulkner and year 8 girls Me, Paige McGarva, silver in year 7 girls Georgia Bartlam and bronze in year 8 boys Levi Offner and year 8 girls Lenei Curtis. We even got a gold from the table climbing where you had to climb fully down, around and over the table in the fastest time without touching the ground, that was won by Lenei Curtis. We all had an awesome time and were happy with the results.
By Paige McGarva.
On Friday May 6th, 9 students from Tauranga Intermediate went to the 2011 Kayak Challenge at Waimarino. There were four school competing in the competition - Taupo, Ilminster and Otumoetai Intermediates.
We arrived in time for the briefing and prepared ourselves for the races to come. The boys started off with the 50m sprint race and the girls with the slalom. The competition was tough, particularly Ilminster and Taupo Intermediate were good contenders. The second to last race was the toughest event - the 2km kayak race but Tauranga Intermediate managed to scrape through with a first and a 6th and a 2nd and 3rd in the girls race.
The last event was the rescue and we took out both the boys and girls division. The team had a great day winning the best overall girl - Petra Ririnui Rm 1 and boy - Fergus Kirk Rm 7 for the day and winning the trophy for the 6th year in a row!
Girls Team Boys Team
Rawinia Cavendish Rm 36 Fergus Kirk Rm 7
Maddison Rose Rm 41 Marshall Wells Rm 41
Petra Ririnui Rm 1 Fynn Dangen Rm 34
Caitlyn Lyttle Rm 7 Steven Masters Rm 21
Jannika Glasgow Rm 2
Written by Fergus Kirk, Room 7
