It was a long-anticipated wait for our Year 9 camp to commence at the Sir Peter Blake MERC. It was a fantastic opportunity to get to know the other students while away at our three-day camp. We were lucky to have the privilege of being able to do the water and land activities. Also, there was a great food selection throughout the camp. Some of the amazing food being lasagna, nachos, hotdogs that Mr Taylor cooked to “perfection” and a lot more delicious dishes.
After we arrived at Long Bay, we had an exciting challenge waiting for us called Blake Amazing Race where we had to run around Long Bay Regional Park participating in challenges such as constructing a bivouac, memorizing a sentence then going down a flying fox and reciting the sentence back to the student leader, creating a stretcher out of bamboo poles and rope and carrying a patient to safety, and using a grid search method to find wooden planks in the sand before deciphering a famous quote from Sir Peter Blake.
During the activities with our MERC instructors, we had fun kayaking, paddleboarding, canoeing, climbing up and down a big Norfolk Island pine tree and racing each other up a wooden ladder. It was super fun and intense and everyone enjoyed every second of it!
On our final day of camp, we climbed to the top of North Head then proceeded to do an orienteering challenge trying to find answers to questions we got handed to us and trying to match images to their corresponding locations around the mountain. Overall, it was a fantastic chance to bond with our whānau classmates, experience new activities and learn new skills.
~ Cormack Douglas 9B1 and Evan Gu 9B1 (and credits for helping Thenu Dhanasinghe 9B1)