New Location a Winner for Boys’ School Year 7 Camp
New Location a Winner for Boys’ School Year 7 Camp
March 06, 2018 at 6:51 PM
After being washed out of the McLaren Falls Camp for the last two years, the Boys’ School sought a ‘drier’ location for this year’s Year 7 camp. Whilst McLaren Falls was a superb setting when the conditions were favourable, as they found to their cost, the tent-based venue did not provide for a retreat when the summer deluges of the last two years poured down!
With this in mind, the team looked north to the Whangarei Heads, splitting the 128 Year 7 boys across two campsites, one in the bush and one in cabins, knowing they could all seek refuge if the weather turned foul. The boys loved the mix of locations, spending two nights at each.
Camp Manaia, at the base of Mt Manaia, was the more traditional cabin-based camp with activities such as kayaking, hiking and craft, with the highlight being the hike to the summit of Mt Manaia, 403m above sea level, on a gloriously sunny day. The vista from the top was amazing!
The boys especially enjoyed their nights at Jagger Camp in the bush. This was camping in its truest form with the boys experiencing real bush life. They learned how to start a fire without matches, weave flax to make fishing lines to catch their own food, and cooked bush pizza and damper donuts over an open fire. To add to the experience, the boys slept in hammocks in the trees or in tepees with some boys electing to simply sleep out under the stars. Between the camps they hiked through farmland and across the beautiful Ocean Beach, gathering the flax and wood that would assist them at each of the venues.
Year 7 camp is strategically timed early in the year to allow the new intake of Year 7 boys to settle. Camp provides the perfect opportunity for the new students to integrate with the boys who have been at Saint Kentigern since their early years. In turn, Whangarei Heads proved to be a fantastic new venue, providing the right mix of activities for our boys to be challenged and offering the opportunity discover new friendships through shared experiences.
Our sincere thanks to the staff and parents who joined forces to make this camp possible.
