Cooks Hill finished on top of the pointscore for the Hunter branch age championships after two days of hard-fought surf-lifesaving competition at Fingal Beach.
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Cooks Hill amassed 2982 points throughout the carnival to hold out their nearest rivals Swansea-Belmont (2857).
Caves Beach (1104) were third overall, Redhead (1045) fourth and the hosts were fifth with 958 points.
Several hundred nippers converged on Fingal Beach over the weekend and there were plenty of stand-out performances ahead of the NSW championships, which will be staged at Blacksmiths Beach next month.
Leading the charge for Cooks Hill was under-14 girls competitor and Hunter branch representative Bella Williams.
Williams completed a treble in the water events, winning the surf race, board race and ironperson for her age group.
She also did well on the sand. Williams placed third in the beach sprint, behind winner Freya Konetschnik (Cooks Hill) and second place-getter Destiny Fenton (Redhead). Williams was also third in the beach flags to winner Jasmin Thomas (Nobbys) and runner-up Molly Breasley (Cooks Hill).
Konetschnik was second to Williams in the board race and ironperson and third in the surf race.
Sophie McMahon, also from Cooks Hill, was the under-13 girls champion in the surf race and ironperson.
Newcastle’s Jack Johns won the under-12 boys’ board and ironman races.
Jayden Wright from Redhead and Kaitlyn McMahon from Cooks Hill earned the prestigious Junior Lifesaver of the year accolades.
The Junior Iron Man of the Year award went to Nick Stoddart, from Swansea-Belmont, and Williams was named Iron Person of the Year.
In the under-nine girls’ age group, Swansea-Belmont’s Kaitlin Rees showed her versatility by winning the beach sprint, placing second in the beach flags to Daisy Breasley (Cooks Hill) and hitting the water for second in the surf race to Breasley and second to Bronte Bowker (Cooks Hill) in the board race.
Fingal Beach will host another 500 competitors next weekend when the Hunter branch surfboat and open carnivals are staged there on Saturday and the masters titles on Sunday.
It caps a busy summer for the Port Stephens club, who also hosted a round of the Summer of Surf series in November.
Caves Beach and Newcastle are expected to set the pace in the open men’s surfboat division after they finished the Hunter-Central Coast series on 34 points and first and second respectively.
Swansea open women were the stand-out Hunter crew of the six-round series, which concluded at Soldiers Beach on the Central Coast last Saturday.
