Surfers from Puttur shine at Intl Surfing Championship


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Mangalore, 25 Sep 2014: It took just one year for Sinchana Gowda, 12, a Std VII student and AneeshaNayak, 13, a Std VIII student, to gain mastery over surfing. They have created history by winning the second and third place respectively at the Covelong Point Classic, an international surfing championship held at Chennai, organised by the Surfing Federation of India (SFI) under licence from the International Surfing Association (ISA).

 

Sinchana and Aneesha hail from Puttur, about 50 km from Mangalore, and are students of Sundana Residential School. They were pulled into surfing by their swimming coach Partha Varanashi, who learnt surfing when he was in Australia for six years. Sinchana and Aneesha, along with some other children from Puttur, started training under a national medallist surfer Dhruva Das of Mantra Surf Club at Balavana swimming pool in Puttur.

 

"We experimented with the surfing training. Since the students are about 80 km away from the beach, they would learn to paddle, balance on skate board, duck dive and work on their strength and conditioning at the pool. We realised that they were much better at paddling. On weekends, they were taken to the beach at Mulky near Mangalore and Bekal in Kasargod for training. There they would learn to face the big waves and use the board to stand up and surf," Varanashi told.

 

In round one, heats, both Sinchana and Aneesha were up against Alysia of Australia and Olga of Russia. "Both our girls fought hard and got through to the finals. Aneesha, who was at the bottom till the last five minutes to go, found something. She says it was her instinct that made her catch that winner! She paddled hard, caught that wave, stood up and pumped, which made the international judges give her the best score of that round. Sinchana did quite well to finish second in the heat behind Aneesha," said Varanashi.

 

The finals were held on Sept 14. The girls from Puttur were up against Ishita Malavya, India’s first female surfer and Suhasini Damian of Auroville, Tamil Nadu.

 

Powerful overhead swells with a strong current stared to pick up as the horn went off for the 20-minute finals. On the seventh minute, Sinchana managed to catch something the rest couldn’t. "She spotted a big swell outside, paddled hard at it and she caught it!! As the speed picked up, she pulled her shoulders up and brought her right foot up the board to stand up and fearlessly ride that wave to score the first points of the session," Varanashi said.

 

Around the 10-minute mark, Aneesha spotted a wave on the right side. She positioned herself perfectly, paddled and caught it in textbook style, Varanashi said. Surfers get to catch as many as 10 waves in the 20 minute session. All the 10 waves will be scored by the judges, but only the top two scores are added up to decide the results.

 

Still, Suhasini took the spotlight. In the last five minutes, she started to surf on the left where the wave formation was better. She rode two waves beautifully to score high points. She won the championship, Rs 15,000 cash prize and a NSP surf board worth Rs 35,000. Sinchana won second place and Rs 10,000 cash, Aneesha got Rs 5,000. The state has about 10 dedicated surfers.

 

 

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