Two days of Championships.

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Geo: -21.2318, -159.763

The last two days we have been totally occupied by the Athletics. On Wednesday the day began in an overcast way. After breakfast caught the 10am bus to the track as I was running the Junior Men's and Women's High Jump at 12pm. This was a good event and we only had a few showers during it, not like the driving rain from last night. Our Jumps team has a mixture of Australians, Kiwis and Cook Islanders and everyone is friendly and flexible in what they can do. Then at 2pm we officiated at the Heptathlon Long Jump. Another event which ran smoothly. It is great to see a variety of Islanders here .We had Tahitians, New Guineans, Fijians as well as competitors from Australia and NZ.

Once that was finished I had lunch and was supposed to be finished for the day. However, the other team was running the Octathlon High Jump which was going for a very long time. They were supposed to be also on the Women's Triple Jump final. As it was obvious they were not going to finish in time, I scraped together enough officials to set up and run the Triple Jump. We were into the fourth round by the time the others were free. All in the spirit of cooperation.

We returned to the Resort about 5-30pm. We had noticed that just down the road from our hotel was a restaurant with a sign saying Seafood Platter for two, $80. One of the other officials recommended it as well so we decided to try it out. We walked there slowly. Fletcher's sciatica is still bad. The restaurant was called Tunumu and looked very inviting. We were asked if we had a booking and as we said No they were then unsure,. However, there were a couple of tables in the garden and they offered us one of them. At one stage it started raining so we moved to one under shelter.

The Seafood platter was generous in serves but rather disappointing. We had asked for no mussels so were given extra prawn tails instead. The oysters were great but the fresh King Prawns were rather floury. The calamari was OK but the fish was stodgy. We were not convinced it was worth $80.

Today was an early start. We were on the bus at 7-45am as my first event, the Women's Senior High Jump commenced at 9am. The sun was out but we still had some passing showers. From there we rolled through 3 more events. Two Long Jumps and the Men's Senior Triple. All went well. The program finished at 3pm and we had a group photo of officials on the track after that. It was a great three days of renewing acquaintances, making new friends and participating in an enjoyable event with Cook Island Hospitality.

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Photos

400 metres Junior race
Batinisavu Uluiyata from Fiji powers to a new meet record

Final of the 200 metres
Toea Wisil from PNG wins

Triple Jump winner
A narrow foul