YARRA WEEK 3 TERM 2 2023

Hello everyone!

Now it’s time to debrief on how week 3 went with the crew 🙂

On Wednesday the 17th of May, we collected the group for an early morning camp pack down. We want to ensure that everyone involves themselves as we aim to have everyone understand how to take care of the gear we use. That way we can continue to support even more groups in the future thanks to our group's involvement. After this we allowed some free play before beginning our camp organisation for the coming week. We began with organising what we’ll eat and explaining what else we’ll be able to do other than just surfing. We then moved on to a session on respectful relationships, where we went into depth about the LGBTQIA+ community, healthy relationships, consent and values we hold for relationships. The group was extremely receptive and had many questions and statements throughout this session, allowing even further discussion during this time. After this session we collected back to our bus to move onto our final activity of the day, spray painting with Brody at the Yarra Youth Centre. Brody is a professional spray paint artist who works not only at the Yarra Youth Centre, but also completes commissions for a variety of locations asked for by businesses and even the government. The session allowed everyone to have a moment to connect with their artistic expression, with free space and time to work on their personal pieces. After this we thanked Brody and finished with the day with a little game of pool and table tennis before dropping off for the day.

On Thursday the 18th of May we collected our group, and began our session with grabbing our trailer full of canoes. Heading to the Yarra river, at Bellbird Picnic grounds we got our crew to the water's edge with all our gear. Thanks to us all working as a team this gear unpacking was extremely quick and allowed us to begin with putting on our safety gear (Personal flotation devices) and our safety drills right away. Kate, being a trained canoe instructor, explained different movements with the paddles and what signals meant what. After this we separated into teams of two and chose a canoe before beginning our session. After learning our different strokes we continued down the river with our three teams, laughing and chatting along the way. As we continued a slight mishap had occurred which was explained as a possibility in the safety drills. One of our boats had flipped with two of our crew in the water. After getting them into our boats and ensuring their safety, we moved the flipped boat to another location and went about the business of reflipping it. The team stood on as Kate explained what she was doing and why, and how to handle this situation if they were to go canoeing again in the future. After some effort and a little time the boat was flipped back to its original position after draining it of the water it had taken in. We then moved on to finish the canoeing session back to our starting point. With a small rest we began our long movement of the boats back up the hill, and although there were some complaints we eventually got all our gear up to our trailer. The students changed and enjoyed their lunch before we debriefed on the session, and took all participants back to the station for the finish of the day.

On Friday the 19th, we sadly did not run our Surf Life Saving session as many students had illnesses or were unable to attend the day. Due to this we sent the limited students who did attend to their respective schools for the day. We then began preparing what we could for week 4 for the rest of the day.

This has been a tumultuous week, allowing personal growth, and understanding in a variety of areas and we’re very proud of everyone who was able to come on these days. We would also like to wish all those who are feeling unwell, well, and hope that they will soon be able to return to our group in the coming week.

For this reason we will also not have a student of the week to answer any questions for us.