The Spirit of Adventure trophy challenge puts four schools from around the country against each other in a number of different events that earn your team points.

 Each school sends a team of 10 Year 10 students to compete for the Spirit trophy. We were up against schools from Auckland, Whangarei and Christchurch.

Challenges in the programme include teamwork, problem solving, debate, ship-handling and water sports. The teams also go ashore and complete tasks against each other that involve ingenuity, leadership and fun.

Some of the activities we excelled at as a team were…

Name the members of the other teams. I think we won this because we are VERY social and chatted with everyone over the first few hours on the boat.

Spirit Singstar. This is where you are given a random word and are to sing a couple of lines from as many songs as you can which include that word. I feel as if we won this event as we sang nearly all day, every day on the boat and were complimented for our love of singing.

Chant. The chant was something which we put a lot of effort into, and tried to incorporate our Maori side and our stand out experiences on the boat. Which we did!

The Raft Race. This was something which really tested our teamwork and leadership within our group. At the start we couldn’t even paddle straight and resulted in a lot of stressing because of how bad we were, but with Massie taking control of the steering at the back of the raft, we were on to a good thing (as long as everyone stayed in the raft, eh Danien?!). With everything sorted for the race we were set to go, after a tight turn, we were paddling furiously for the ship… Only to come in a close second.

The spirit also gave us some chances to experience things that we have never done before and may never get to do again. This was things like swimming with dolphins, swinging from the rope swing off the boat, climbing the rigging, piloting the ship, eating kumara and pineapple mash (as in the pineapple was hidden IN the kumara… let me just say that it's not something you want to find in what you thought was a perfectly good kumara mash!)

Although, none of this would have been experienced if it wasn’t for our awesome community which helped us with many different fundraising events in order to get to where we wanted to go. In the lead up to the Spirit, we held multiple events to raise money, which included a Quiz Night held at the college, stocktake at the Foxton Beach Four Square, a hangi fundraiser, Swazi jackets and an iPhone raffles, and multiple sausage sizzles held at New World. We would like to thank everyone for their support, it has been very appreciated by the whole of the Spirit of Adventure team! 

We would like to individually thank Koteka Electrical for their sponsorship & supplying our awesome team jersey, which is something which we will cherish for a long time and holds lots of very special memories as our team uniform.

A very big thank you goes out to Mr. Nathan Webb for jumping on our Spirit team waka, literally a week before we were bound to leave and start our journey on the way up to Auckland. You made this trip an unforgettable experience and ultimately brought us closer as a group and gave a whanau feeling around the group! Thanks heaps Nath, it was an awesome experience with you!

Finally, we’d like to say thank you to all of the staff here at Manawatu College for all of your time and hard work you put into helping us, especially Ms. Tucker who was ultimately our link between leaving Foxton and boarding the boat! You did more work than any of us and we are so grateful for everything you’ve done for us so thank you!

So, on behalf of Dante, Massie, Aaron, Danien, Jasmyn, Riana, Brooke, Karlissa and both of us, thank you everyone for your support and helping us to gain the experience!

A voyage like ours lasts a lifetime. The Spirit is what we'll remember about 2016.

Thank you!

 McKenzie Laursen and Connor Thwaites