Shearing: Expectant Napier mum wins New Zealand Shears Open woolhandling title

Napier's Angela Stevens, expecting her fourth child at the end of June, wins her first New Zealand Shears Open woolhandling title. Photo / SSNZ

Angela Stevens, of Napier, has won the New Zealand Shears Open woolhandling final, in the latest of a series of family triumphs in Te Kuiti for the family of 2017 world champion and three-times New Zealand Shears Open shearing champion John Kirkpatrick and wife Raylene.

Their 31-year-old daughter Angela and son-in-law, shearer and woolhandler Ricci Stevens are expecting their fourth child in late June — the woolhandler triumphing on Saturday night despite being 27 weeks pregnant.

Angela Stevens and Cushla Abraham represented New Zealand in the summer’s home-and-away transtasman series.

She’s no longer woolhandling and is now in early childhood education at Busy Bees, Havelock North, and studying for a diploma and aiming to qualify late this year.

With regular New Zealand Shears Open winners Joel Henare and Sheeree Alabaster not at the championships this year, it was a chance for a few others to dominate the stage, with Monica Potae, of Milton, the runner-up, Chelsea Collie, of Hamilton, third, Sue Turner, of Aria, fourth, and fifth was Te Kuiti’s Hanatia Tipene, also now in a teaching career and the only other person apart from Henare and Alabaster, and now Stevens, to have won the title since 2008.

Angela Stevens. Photo / SSNZ

Stevens, who had to pull out of a world championships New Zealand team selection series — the baby is due in the same week as the big event in Scotland — won the junior title at Te Kuiti in 2016, while her husband won the following year and then won the senior final in 2018.

Meanwhile, Southland shearer Leon Samuels became the first South Island shearer to win either the New Zealand Shears or Golden Shears Open finals in three decades.

The win on Saturday by 39-year-old Samuels on the last night of the three-day New Zealand Shears, was the first by a South Islander in the big Te Kuiti event since Edsel Forde, also of Southland, won the event in 1993.