Amazon Hearts "Premier Woman's"
2022-2023
October 2021-March 2022
Unfortunately South Islands and Nationals were both canceled this season. We are grateful for NZDBA which ran some virtual challenges from March to June, which gave our team opportunities to still get out and paddle, have a bit of fun chasing and bettering our own and other teams times. We finished the month of April with two gold dragons! One for the "senior B 200m small boat" in a time of 51 seconds and the second one for the "premier woman's 200m small boat" in a time of 50 seconds. One of our paddlers also received "Sports Woman of the Year" at the Aoraki Awards Evening for dedication to her team and the dragon boating community during the year. It was a great way to end the 2022 year.
Pan Pacific Masters Games November 2022
We started our 2022-23 season by taking a small boat of our masters to the Pan Pacific Masters Games held on the Gold Coast of Australia. For some this was their first chance to dragon boat outside of New Zealand. We raced in the the 200m, 500m, and joined with Diamond Phoenix from Canberra for the 4.8km race. A side from making new paddling friends the highlight was racing the 4.8km, we even managed to catch a fish on our way round
Wellington March 2023
We thought it would be fun to attend the "Wellington Festival" as a fun regatta... to ride the waves of Wellington Harbour. We invited some of our paddling friends and Evan to join us and headed north. All was fun and games until the end of the first heat, when we realised that we had the fastest time of the heat. We turned very serious very quickly... We came away from the festival having had massive amounts of fun and bringing home a silver medal. As you will see below we narrowly missed out on a gold by 0.02sec
South Islands and Nationals 2023
We won a Silver in the 2k and a bronze in the 500m's at South Islands at Lake Ruger. This set us up well for National which was held over Easter Weekend. Amazon Hearts also had a large number representing Aoraki in the regionals racing at Nationals in all age groups. For the first time we made it into the Premier Woman's A final with a 7th placing. We also came away from Nationals with a bronze in the Senior B Woman's small boat racing. Two of our premier woman represented Aoraki and won a gold, while those representing Senior B came a close third.
IBCPC Festival NZ 2023
Although we are a premier woman's team, some of our team are able to race in the BC division. They were able to join a composite team made up of paddlers from three other counties, this was a great way to meet other BC paddlers from around the world, they have made life long friendships. Some of our other teams members stayed on as volunteers and supporters of our BC team mates. The International Breast Cancer Festival is held every four years, New Zealand won the right to hold the Festival five years ago, which was announced during the closing ceremony in Florence. The participants came from all over the world with 82 teams competing in this participatory event. It was for some, a once in a life time opportunity to be involved in such a up lifting and positive Dragon Boat Festival.
