The next day was the Wairoa extreme race and the 2nd race in the series. The Wairoa river on the Kaimias is one of my favourite rivers and i really enjoyed this race. It started off with a time trial which was about 6 minutes long. It started with a seal launch into the river below McLaren falls and then sprint down some pretty big rapids, i hadn't paddled the river since it had changed from the floods so it was pretty exciting. I was third in the time trials which seeded us for the head to head race down the rollercoaster rapid. I had a quick look at the rapid and then the race started. My first race was agianst Laura and was pretty close. Laura was a pretty fiesty competitor and started trying to spin my boat out from the beginning. I got in front of her but took a different line down the bottom of the rapid. I touched the banner first at the end but later found out that you weren't allowed to go down the chute i went down. However the fastest loser which was me got put through to semi's.
The semi's was another close race with Louise, but i managed to stay in front and take it out! I was stoked :-) the next round was the finals we had to climb up the rocks to get to the start line luckily i had a lot of awesome people helping me. I was up against Toni, a good friend and an awesome paddler. She managed to cut me off at the start of the race and i didn't manage to catch up to her. So i ended up in second place which i am still super happy about. I am now going to start looking for a bigger and faster boat for next year :-)
Last weekend we had the Andy Duff race which is a mass start race with heaps of paddlers battling it out, it was alot of fun and i had a good race. There is a final race in the series in Queenstown but i have a slalom race the same weekend which i am racing and coaching at so unfortunatley i can't go. But next year i will do the series and can't wait. For now i'm off doing some school kayak instructing, slalom coaching and back to uni for my last year!
