Get To Know Team Cronulla.
The legends from Down Under.
It’s a sunny day in Cronulla, New South Wales, Australia. It’s a suburb of Sydney and is well known for its amazing beaches and sports culture. Brendan Tynan-Davey, the president of the Cronulla Outrigger Canoe Club is all smiles with the weather being great. He recalls a few weeks ago the weather being a completely different story, with non-stop rain resulting in devastating floods. It was during this rainy week that the Australian Outrigger Canoe Racing Association (AOCRA) held its crown event, the Sydney Harbour Challenge. An international outrigger canoe race that brings in clubs from around the country and top talent from all parts of the world. Brendan tells us how bad the weather was, describing that the race-course will take you past some of Sydney’s most iconic spots. However with the rain coming down so hard, one could barely see anything at times.
Despite the terrible weather on race day, Team Cronulla walked away with great achievements overall as a club. The Open Men’s crew capturing gold and the Senior Women’s crew earning silver.
Cronulla Outrigger Canoe Club.
COCC was established in 1997. It has proven itself to be a powerhouse in the Australian Outrigger Canoe Racing championships with multiple State and National Championships being won in Open and Masters Marathon and Marathon Changeover OC6 events. Further, many of its paddlers have achieved National Championships in OC1 marathon events in the open, masters, and senior master categories. Abroad, the Men’s Masters Crew have had wins at the Molokai Hoe taking first place in 2016 in the Master’s division, 2nd place in 2017 in the Master’s division, and continuous strong performances overall.
Team Cronulla is situated on the crystal clear waters of the Port Hacking River, south of Sydney. The men and women in the club are a tight-knit bunch who have established a “never say die” attitude and a culture of hard work, selflessness, and determination. Team Cronulla has adopted the shark as its totem, and each canoe is named after local and mythical sharks, including the Great White, Mako, and Kauhuhu — the Shark God of Hawaiian mythology.
Team Cronulla lives and breathes the spirit of aloha, and is regularly welcoming visitors from near and far to its waters for a paddle.
Talis Crew is proud to take you to New South Wales, Australia to learn about the Cronulla Outrigger Canoe Club, giving you an insider look at one of Australia’s top performing paddling clubs. We “pull up a stump to” Brendan, as he breaks down all things Team Cronulla.
The Secret To A Strong Performing Club.
We’ve done consistently well throughout the years but coming back from all of the lockdowns the men and women crews have really made an effort to get together as much as possible to paddle.
It was all influenced by our core crew who fought through adversity. Many work for emergency services and for airlines. A lot of them had to quarantine being exposed to Covid. The airlines were laying off workers, it was a really tough time.
We’ve been lucky to have Kelly Burton with us for the past two years to keep up the moral. He’s a strong OC1 paddler. For him to be leading our crew has helped us out tremendously. He’s a strong paddler and “larrikin”, he’s the type of guy that everyone in the club gets behind. Also with guys like Rod Wyse and Grant Olufson, they are leaders of men.
Team Cronulla’s approach is to distribute the up and coming talent with the top talent. What we do regularly is to mix the crews. It’s a way to push ourselves and the people around us to become better paddlers within the club. It’s not about winning the Sydney Harbour Challenge or State Titles, it’s just about giving ourselves achievable goals if you continue to practice with us. Of course, when it comes to the big races we will plan strategically but at the club, let’s develop that fun, that internal competitive culture to get better.
Keeping fitness up and making sure you eat well are also really important, going to the gym and doing more than just paddling.
Running COCC And Covid Pressures.
I’m very much hands on and try to take on a lot of duties, maybe sometimes too much my wife says (chuckles) that I forget to delegate enough but we have a solid group of people at Team Cronulla and they help out a great deal.
There’s a lot of paperwork involved. Understanding and planning for risk assessment, insurance, government approvals just to get club members back on the water.
But you gotta have fun or it’ll become a chore. After our Sunday sessions, we always try to go for coffee to chat and joke around. We will try to wear our best Hawaiian shirts or horrible dad clothes. Cafe culture has exploded over here so grabbing a coffee and wearing your breakfast shirt is a big thing here. You gotta be loud and out there, have a bit of fun with it.
We’ve had two big lockdowns in New South Wales, starting in March 2020. Everything got canceled, training was canceled, all races were canceled. It wasn’t until the end of the year 2020 that we were able to slowly get back to training. There were a lot of restrictions being applied to sports, and these rules weren’t necessarily applicable to the sport of outrigger. As a result, we weren’t able to do OC6 paddling but we were able to paddle OC1. A lot of people purchased OC1’s to make the best of it and it helped the overall skill levels improve. Our women’s crew has improved by leaps and bounds.
We ended up going through another lockdown in 2021 and upon return, we had to be fully vaccinated. It was a situation where we needed to check everyone’s vaccination records before letting them train or the authorities could fine our club. Our club members were good, no one was against vaccination, it was just more the process of checking.
During all of this time, what put pressure on the club was the lack of cash coming in. Typically we hold fundraisers at local pubs. We’ll do raffles to help support the club and these past two years put that to a stop. As a result, we survived on membership fees and regattas. One of our regattas was canceled however we did manage to hold another one which allowed COCC to generate some cash. From those funds we ended up purchasing a new Unlimited canoe for the club, it’s beautiful. We named it Niuhi which is Hawaiian for man-eating shark.
Respect For The Ocean
A couple of weeks ago, we had our canoe blessing with another local club and had to talk about our canoe and the name we gave. That week there was a tragedy at a nearby beach where a person had died from a vicious shark attack. Before then, the last accident of that nature was 62 years ago.
At the ceremony, the pastor and the Polynesian boys blessing the canoe told us that I needed to tell everyone the name of the canoe. To explain why the club came up with this name. Up until then, only a few people knew about the name of our newest canoe, and it was my responsibility to go tell everyone at this ceremony.
With all eyes on me, I told everyone that the name of our canoe was the Niuhi. Looking around, I saw that everyone just looked at me and there was just complete silence, you could hear a pin drop. The reason why we had named our canoe the Niuhi is because we want to pay respect to nature. The ocean is always dangerous, we must make sure that we care for each other every time we get out on the water because anything can happen. There must always be respect for the ocean.
Get to know more about the Cronulla Outrigger Canoe Club by following their social media accounts:
https://www.instagram.com/teamcronulla/
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Good times ahead!
