There to serve surf community

Charmaine Clark at the national surfing championships at Piha this year with Lion Rock, or Te Piha, in the background. Picture supplied

Gisborne's Charmaine Clark hopes her appointment as a board member of Surfing New Zealand will let her serve the wider surfing community.

Clark has quietly helped establish several things over the years, mostly funding apps or core docs.

“I would like to see more tikanga Maori in competitive New Zealand surfing, and more whanau Maori surfing,” she said.

“Besides my desire to serve the Maori community or the surf community in general, I want to stay involved and offer as much as I can to surfing from my other experiences.”

Clark works for Te Puni Kokiri, which has given her experience in governance, project management and funding applications that she believes will also benefit SNZ.

She said the SNZ board had “lots to get done”. Funding discussions, ongoing negotiations, surfing's inclusion at the Olympics and the Covid-19 restrictions on competition were among the issues they were dealing with.

Clark was appointed late last year, and she had found that members worked well together.

She was sure they shared the same vision of them gathering for a meeting at the end of three years as a board and reflecting on what they had achieved, “looking over Makas (Makorori), two to three foot, offshore, and glassy waves, sharing a laugh, a kai and a drink”.

Clark said she hadn't been confident about getting the position. Even after being shortlisted, she didn't want to tell her close friends and family.

“I thought I'd give it a go because it's a positive way to get involved.”

She started surfing as a five-year-old in the Kawakawa wash pools, from Atlas Woods to the 6ft 2in thruster of the time, surfing was her soul food, medicine for her mind and body, and that was before Charmaine knew what was about to happen on her journey.

In her 20s, Charmaine was diagnosed with a serious chronic illness that stopped her from doing a lot of the activities she loved.

She was unable to surf as she once had and sought ways to give back to the sport that had given her so much.

Her pen portrait on the SNZ website says that despite her illness, “her passion has never ceased”.

“She chooses to support surfing, the sport she loves, through governance. Her body may not want to play ball, but her mind is still paddling out and pulling in.”