For Waihī Beach woman Seugnet Toweel, being on the water is a meditative experience; a place where she leaves everything behind and focuses on the now.
“It feeds the soul,” she said.
“When you’ve had a hectic day at work, you can take a breath, hop on the waka and you go.”
Come August 13 though, the water will also be a place of intense concentration, precision, and determination, as she and five fellow paddlers head to Hilo, Hawaii, for the 2024 IVF Va’a World Elite and Club Sprint Championships.
The six women – Suegnet, Jayne Magowan, Merrin Sutherland, Sharon Rose Stone, Vicki Farr and Gillian Tata-Henry, along with former teammate Verity Thom – form the core of Whaitere Gold, a 60s+ waka ama team based at the Hauraki Waka Ama club.
“One of our girls is unable to go to Worlds. But Verity was a big part of getting us to nationals, because she stuck with us,” she said.
“This crew in particular, we’ve trained together for a number of years. You know, it’s quite a challenging thing to pull six women together of totally different personalities and backgrounds, and then learn to work together as a team and trust each other and rely on each other.
“We always say that timing is everything. And when you do stay in time and you all work as one, it’s an incredible feeling because the waka picks up and it glides, and you can just feel everyone synced.”
Whaitere Gold will be competing in two events at Worlds: the V6 1000 and V6 500.
“The 1000-metre turn race… you do four 250-metre sprints, and then you turn around the buoy at the end of each one. It’s very hard and fast, and it’s very precise. You’ve got three or four different ways that you could get disqualified – there’s a lot of skill involved,” Seugnet said.
“And then there’s a 500-metre sprint, which is just a straight race.”
Now, the race is on to prepare the team, with training, training and more training. Two times a week they travel from as far afield as Turua and Mount Maunganui to practice together on the water at the Waihī Beach clubrooms; the rest of the week is spent in various forms of land-based training.
“We all do circuit training, in-gym training, I do boxing,” she said.
“[And] we have been fundraising fiercely, raffles and market stalls. Because it does add up to a big cost – we have an international coach who comes and trains us for a weekend or two, there’s uniforms, there’s all sorts of things.”
And while they would love to at least make it to the finals, Seugnet said the main draw of the event was the sport itself.
“When I first started, it definitely was so out of my comfort zone. I grew up a thousand miles from water,” Seugnet said.
“That’s the beauty with waka, is that it actually opens up doors. And you don’t have to be this fit, strong, confident person – it is a sport that is quite open to any age group, any physical ability, any gender. I think that makes it a very attractive sport.”
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