An Awesome Time at the Beach

Our Stories

Being from small country towns, the children of the ‘Top Paddock’ region don’t often get to the beach. The closest beach is over 4 hours away! Our number one goal this week was to make sure we spent as much time at the beach as possible.

Before every beach activity, we have a discussion on beach safety, one of the questions we ask is “have you ever been to a beach before?” This week, majority of the group put their hands up to say “no”, they have never been to a beach before.

This always excites us as camp leaders, because we get the honour of taking children to the beach for the first time ever. But it also means we have to keep an extra eye on the children to make sure they’re ok.

One particular camper had never seen the beach or felt sand before. He was extremely eager to get down to the beach and had no fear when it came to the waves. He was jumping into them and getting absolutely smashed by them, but popping back up with a huge grin on his face. We had to watch him carefully as he struggled to find his feet after a waved rolled through. We would be in knee deep water but he didn’t quite understand that he could actually stand up and would swim and flap around until he found his feet. He finally realised that in knee deep water he could stand up and not worry about losing his feet.