Source: Radio New Zealand
File photo. The stone skimming competition will take place at Lake Hāwea. Harrison Fitts / Pexels
New Zealand’s best stone skimmers will have the chance to show off their talents on the shores of Wānaka’s Lake Hāwea on Saturday.
Organiser of the Aotearoa Stone Skimming Championship, Richie Laming, told First Up the lake was a perfect spot for the event at 400m deep with some “lovely Otago stones just made for skimming”.
Laming said money raised by the event would be going to Melanoma NZ.
“Everyone can remember their best skim, but they can’t always remember their distance,” Lamming said, encouraging everyone to come down and give it a go in the open male and female championships.
He said cheating was not a worry for the event as following a cheating scandal at the world stone skimming champs in 2025, a robust anit-cheating framework had been put in place.
“Competitors on the day will select their stones from the shores of Lake Hāwea under the scrutinising eye of “Taskforce Skim” marshals. They have an hour to collect their stones and then they won’t see those stones again until, so there’s no chance of tampering with those stones.”
Richie Laming is the organsier of the first-ever Aotearoa Stone Skimming Championship. Lake Hāwea Station
Laming was very clear the championships was for skimming stones rather than skipping them.
Skimming accounts for the distance, skipping is how many times it interacts with the water. The skimming technique had a lot of different features to it – one important element is how much rotation you actually put on the stone.”
Laming said there were a lot of men out there who considered themselves “worthy skimmers” but he believed there was a “finesse” to the female technique.
“I’m excited to see the match up and see the winning distances for open female and male.”
Working out what the distances were and who were the winners was a complex system, Laming said, which involved “Taskforce Skim” on the land, along with a GPS marked lane system with buoys on the lake.
There was also a team from Southern Land Development Consultants, who were a surveying firm in Wānaka, who would be triangulating the distance of the throws, Laming said, and a team of videographers who would “provide aerial support”.
“So we’ve got a three-way verification system. potentially making it one of the more robust skim measuring teams in the world.”
Bad weather wouldn’t be an issue on Saturday, Laming said, as New Zealand didn’t want to be known as a nation of “fair-weather skimmers”.
“If there’s a slight ripple on the water you might need to be careful with your stone selection… but we will make a call on Thursday. We actually have a back-up location which guarantees calm conditions.”
Laming said there was one key change between the two locations – on the lake, it was the best of three throws, but on the back-up location, which was a custom built pond, it would be the cumulative of three throws.
“No body of water’s the same, no stone’s the same…. can you adjust? That’s what’s going to dictate a true champion for New Zealand.”
Details for the competition could be found on the Aotearoa Stone Skimming Championship website.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand