STAND UP PADDLING with Mark Jackson
PUNTING
Our regular Stand Up Paddling (SUP) contributor is the energetic Mark Jackson, North Shore native and owner of Stand Up South Pacific Ltd. After 25 years competing and teaching in Hawaii, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, Mark Jackson has brought Standup South Pacific to New Zealand. As a water sports instructor he has taught for many well known sports stars and celebrities. Some of his competitive results include: 1987 Wailea Speed Crossing 1st Place; 1988 Maui County Slalom Championships 1st Place; 2nd 3rd & 4th places in the Papa He’e Nalu Tandem Maui Surf; 2007 Maui Canoe & Kayak Club S.U.P. Division Champion; 2007 SUP Starbucks Maui to Molokai Challenge 1st Place.
PUNTING
Mark Jackson profiles the new sport combining Hunting with Stand Up Paddling!
If you were a Punter would you be – gambling on a horse race, the victim of a con man, kicking a rugby ball, or a customer in a house of disrepute? The fun thing about this 'sorta slanguage' is within its colloquial commonness, it is so dynamic!
A Punt is actually a flat bottom boat propelled by a punter with a long pole.
So is Stand Up Paddling! Really 'Pop Culture Punting' or are we all just a bunch of plankers gone walkabouts?
Damon Overington, our Stand Up South Pacific/Les Mills SUP Team Trainer, has just returned from a water walkabout. A very strange yet successful Punting expedition. Pig hunting on a paddle board, or, as his brother Callum likes to call it – poaka whakangau kopapa.
Whilst 'Damo' is more your Tangaroa type (God of the Sea), Callum is Tane (God of the forest and it’s creatures). Both of them are Barry Crump spin-off's – good keen men who’s combined Kiwi ingenuity has spawned the sport of Punting.
Callum, who often hunts with his two sons, Grady (aged 9) and Beaden (7) is a self confessed hunting devotee. He and his two boys were recently highlighted on Maori Television’s Hunting Aotearoa (see Callum Overington 07/09
www.maoritelevision.com). He now has a new adrenalin addiction, contagious enough to have affected his whole whanau. His wife Kylie, a triathlon activist, cross trains on the SUP, and when it’s time for one of their two boys to have a turn to play on it, the other successfully copies by standing up in the family Kayak.
Pig hunting on a Stand Up Paddle board supports not only man and best friends, but stealth-like ways to sneak up on Captain Cooker’s. (Popular bread of pig first released in New Zealand by James Cook).
Pictured is Callum with two of his five dogs and on the bow – two second place-getters in the team sport of Punting. Callum will always be the man who “brings home the bacon!” I was privileged to hunt with him and know that he will be just as passionate about hoe wa kainga poaka or “paddling home the pork”.
Congratulations to Damon’s dog Iron who nailed his first Cookie. Callum whom I believe has made Stand Up Paddling history, and you – the reader, who, if you don’t huff 'n puff, but instead let the dog in you out, can blow down the house that characterises your comfort zone and become for the moment, a big bad wolf!
We are now taking bookings for Punting, Phishing and Paddling. Plankers may apply and all fox’s welcome. Phone 0220 PADDLE.
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