Outward Bound Adventures

I was very fortunate to be one of four students to receive a scholarship to go on a 21 day Mind Body Soul Outward Bound course, as I feel like the course has changed my life.

Our course began in Picton where everyone who was going on an Outward Bound course had to organise ourselves in alphabetical order, then load onto the ferry. Once we made it to Anakiwa and split off into our groups, the activities started straight away. We started with get-to-know activities, as we were a group of fourteen strangers. My group, or “watch” as they call it, was Batten watch, and we did nearly everything together.

We did these things that were called schemes, and they were the big activities that Outward Bound is known for. Kayaking, coasteering, tramping, sailing, solo, etc. To choose highlights would be difficult, because nearly everything was a highlight, but I digress. 

The coasteering trip was one of my favourite, and one that I went most out of my comfort zone. We had spent the day climbing around part of the rocky coast of Whites Bay. We were jumping off rocks, and they get higher and higher. The highest point we jumped from was about 30 feet high. It was very fun and exhilarating. The kayaking and coasteering scheme had the theme focused around fun, and afterwards we had to come up with ways we could include fun more into our everyday lives. 

Another highlight would definitely be our sailing/rowing scheme. We all had to learn to operate a Cutter boat, the type of boat Captain Cook would've sailed down the Queen Charlotte sounds in. We were on the boat for three days, we slept one night on the boat, and one night we anchored and slept on land. On the first day there was barely any wind, so we had to row the whole day which was pretty boring. But we did make it the furthest than any other watch had gone  on the first day, 38 km from Anakiwa. The next day we stopped off at a couple places and looked around at some cool spots. The third day we had a lot more wind, so we were able to sail back most of the way to Anakiwa, which was cool. At one point we were going faster than the boat our instructors were on, and we nearly capsized the boat which was funny. The theme for that scheme was teamwork, as we needed to work as a team to be able to get anywhere in the boat.

One lowlights I have from the trip was when we had to do our first tramp. It was a two day tramp, where we had to bush-wack most of the way, in the pouring rain, and if we stopped for too long we would get cold because it was freezing. And we had to sleep under fly's, which wasn't very warm or comfortable. However, the theme for that scheme was resilience, and we all showed resilience by continuing to push through, but we did all come out with sore feet, knees, backs, shoulders, hips, legs, basically everything hurt after that walk. And then when we made it back to Anakiwa we had to jump off the jetty into the cold sea water, but we were allowed a hot shower afterwards which was nice.

Overall, the Outward Bound experience is one I wish everyone could experience, because it has made me become more aware of myself and my surroundings; in the sense that I know more about what I can do, and what I can do for my environment.

If I could take away one thing from that experience, it would be Outward Bound's founder, Kurt Hahn's famous words “plus est en vous”, French for “there is more within you”. It was those words that made me power through whatever challenging activity we were doing.

by Jasin Cassidy