Out and about on day 1 of course
Ka¯piti woman Claire Makepeace wants to know what she’s made of.
She’s about to find out. The 23-yearold has signed up for a 21-day course at Marlborough’s Outward Bound. It’s the first course of 2021.
‘‘I wanted to have the opportunity to push my physical and mental barriers and a lot of people recommended it to me,’’ Makepeace said. ‘‘I expect to be surprised with new experiences, new challenges and I also would like to realise how strong I amat the end of it.’’
The outdoor adventure charity at Anakiwa, on the doorstep of the Marlborough Sounds, is back in business after a tough 2020.
It closed for four months around lockdown, due to the coronavirus pandemic, but reopened at the end of July. Enrolments for some courses are up 70 per cent on last year.
Makepeace had been thinking about doing an Outward Bound course for a while, and finally enrolled in August.
Speaking last week, as her course was just getting started, she said Anakiwa was ‘‘such a nice setting’’.
‘‘Everyone is really friendly and on the same page so it is a good vibe.’’
Coming from Picton to Anakiwa on the Outward Bound boat, Makepeace met Alexandra Gadd, 25, on board.
From Wellington, Gadd had recently joined the workforce.
‘‘I am interested in growing myself and see how I can take this into the workforce. Other people at work have done it as well.’’
Some of her colleagues had done the masters course, for people aged 27 and over, and others had done the ‘women in leadership’ course.
‘‘So my work encouraged me to come along and really supported me to come here. I want to see how you push yourself a lot further than what you think you can,’’ Gadd said.
Makepeace and Gadd were just two of the 139 people on the first Outward Bound course of the year.
Outward Bound sales and enrolmentsmanager Amanda Fogarty said bookings between now and July were up 50 per cent on last year, for adult and youth courses.
Kiwis not being able to travel was most likely behind the high demand, she said.
But some people just wanted to tick Outward Bound off their to-do list.
‘‘Lockdown gave people time to really stop and think and re-evaluate, so people are willing to learn more about themselves and Outward Bound gives them that opportunity.
‘‘More generally, people genuinely want to go out and spend more time connecting with nature,’’ Fogarty said.
Outward Bound school director Simon Graney explained how difficult it was to just put on more courses.
‘‘We can’t respond really quickly and just put more courses on because it takes a long time to train our staff here. It takes about a year for an instructor to be fully independent. The quality of our courses is really important,’’ Graney said.
Graney thought New Zealand might have the only fully operational Outward Bound school in the world because of Covid-19.
‘‘Like the whole country, we just feel incredibly lucky here to be able to get people from all over New Zealand into big groups. We are also really aware of the risks and are pretty careful,’’ Graney said.