Poppy Arkle may be just 14, but this weekend she hit Surf City, El Salvador to compete in the under-18 division at the ISA World Junior Championships. Scotty Stevenson paid a visit to Auckland’s West Coast to learn more about one of New Zealand surfing’s rising stars and the community that helped her live her dream.
It’s a beautiful Autumn Day at Piha. The lightest of breezes blows in off a becalmed Tasman Sea, Lion Rock stands proudly above the grey iron sand, houses from different generations peek out from the thick bush on the hillsides all around. This is home for Poppy Arkle and her family. This is where she learned to surf.
We meet in the family home, nestled among the pōhutukawa trees, it’s A-Frame windows allowing the mid-morning sun to pour into the living room. Frangipanis thrive in planters on the balcony. In the kitchen, jars of homemade hot sauce and spicy feijoa chutney, prepared and sold to the locals to raise money for Poppy’s own version of the endless summer.
We sit at the long wooden table, Poppy fresh from a morning surf while mum Helen is getting ready for official duties with the local fire brigade where she is chief. It has been weeks of quiz nights and bake sales and other fundraisers. Poppy even took to cleaning chimneys over the holidays. Anything to raise a buck. El Salvador is a long way from Piha, and that’s where Poppy now finds herself, surfing for New Zealand at the ISA World Junior Championships.
It’s been an impressive rise through the ranks for the 14-year-old, and one that required somewhat of a strategic redirection early this year. Poppy had attended the national championships in Dunedin in January but failed to progress from the heats in her under-16 category. Instead, she also surfed up a grade, making the final of the under-18 division and finishing fourth.
It was at the suggestion of a family friend that she take those points accrued in the under-18 division and stay in it for the rest of the Billabong Grom Series.
“I think mum and dad were sceptical as the goal for this year was really just to get experience rather than work toward any national selection,” Poppy tells me, all the while smiling at her mum.
“I kept on begging them because I knew I had a chance to make the team and to go to the world champs. I convinced them in the end!”
It was Poppy herself who needed convincing to start surfing. As Helen recalls she taught Poppy and her sister Stella to swim from a very early age as she knew it would be important living at a beach renowned for its heavy surf and powerful, dangerous currents.
“Pops didn’t take to surfing initially so we didn’t push it too hard. She was about eight or nine when she started to really enjoy it, but she’d already been in the waves for a time before that.
“Then she got better than her sister who is two years older. That may have been the real catalyst for her to get right into it!”
Poppy disagrees slightly with the “pushing” bit of Helen’s recollection.
“My whole family would go out surfing and I was basically forced into it! I did start to enjoy it, of course, and I started on the body board but was soon standing up on that, so I guess I was meant to be a surfer.”
And as for getting one over the older sister?
“It was the first thing I was better at than her,” she laughed.
Helen came to New Zealand looking for that connection to the water. Originally from Leeds she says she found that link first in Australia where she travelled after university. She moved back to the UK but knew it was no longer for her. Her husband Ben is also an ex-patriot, having been raised in Plymouth. The two of them fell in love, and fell in love with Piha. Their daughters now share that passion for the place and for the waves. And for Steve Morris surfboards.
It’s quite the place to learn to surf. The Tasman rolls in huge walls of foam and chunk, and even on small days, its power is a constant reminder of its perils. There’s a brutality to its beauty, an anger to way it breaks on the beach and rocks, as if it’s annoyed at the coast getting in its way. Poppy was undeterred. Surfing became her obsession, and people began to notice.
Two of those people were Bridget and Joe Jakicevich, who would often see Poppy running into or out of the water on one of her daily – twice daily in the holidays – surfing missions. Joe, the scion of family business Hancock’s, a liquor distribution enterprise that had its beginnings on the family vineyard on Glengarry Road in the West Auckland suburb of Oratia, took note, and wondered how he might be able to help.
That led to a deal to sponsor Poppy through the Perrier label. Son Jed, also involved in the business, said they didn’t tell the Perrier brand at first, but their client couldn’t have been happier that they had found a worthy recipient.
“When we mentioned it to the Perrier team they were just upset we hadn’t said anything earlier! They are great people and want us to support local causes through their brand. Poppy is a great kid and we wanted to make sure she could get to as many competitions as possible, so we threw in behind her.”
Through the backing, Poppy was able to travel to the full suite of ‘Grom’ events during the first two months of the year. She backed up her fourth at the nationals with a podium at Mount Maunganui, and another at Whangamata. By the end of February she was on the cusp of selection for the New Zealand team, and her final event would be at her home beach, Piha.
“This has been my first year surfing at events other than my local ones, as before this it was simply too much of an expense and I didn’t think I had what it took," she said.
"The support of Joe and Jed and the whole community has changed that this year and I am just so grateful. When that Piha event rolled around, all I could think of was ‘finish first or second, and you’ll be in the team.’”
Maybe it was destiny, the universe aligning, or the joy of local conditions, but things got off to a flyer.
“I started the heat off so well. I got out there and caught the first peeling wave on a low tide dumping day and I got a solid score to start and eventually took second place. When the buzzer stopped on that final I knew I was in the team. I was absolutely stoked.”
There’s a day out in the water surfing for pure joy, and then there’s competition. Competition surfing requires an intense focus, a feel for the conditions, a good understanding of priority and when the best opportunities will present themselves. Surfing is, an exercise in timing – timing the take off, the turn, the very selection of the wave. These are all skills Poppy is still developing, but exposure to surfers from around the world will provide her with invaluable lessons in the tactical nature of the sport.
By the time you read this, she would have had her first taste of the competition. One she believes she’s more than capable of progressing in.
As for her home break. Today the surf feels almost gentle. Out in it, it’s a different story. The Tasman is like that, it’s brooding and moody and it keeps its worst secrets well hidden. Helen says finds it hard to watch Poppy on a big day, while Poppy says she respects the water rather than fears it. She most recently returned from a session on a rough day and told her parents her leash had snapped and she had to swim in. Such is life on the west coast.
“Sometimes when I am going out and there are very few people and the surf is big I do get a bit nervous, but I just paddle into it anyway and usually end up catching some good ones!”
Make or break in El Salvador, Poppy still has plenty of years of age group surfing ahead of her. She was second in both the under-18 and Open women’s divisions at this year’s South Island Championships and could still return to the under-16 ranks next year. But that’s all for later. Right now she’s enjoying surfing for New Zealand, and living her dream. A dream come true thanks to a community that dreams too, on the black sand of a rugged beach, on the edge of a lucky country.
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