Cracking good time for families at Caroline Bay Carnival

The nation’s egg shortage had little impact on a popular Caroline Bay Carnival event, with golf balls already being used in the past few years, in place of the traditional chicken’s egg.

At fun, family-based events at the carnival on Tuesday children, and parents competed in running races and egg and spoon races, with a sand modelling competition on the Bay.

Caroline Bay Carnival Association secretary Kevin Fahey said there was ‘’good competition’’ between everyone who participated in the different age groups in both the boys’ and girls’ categories of the races.

“There were a good numbers [of participants] today and some good crowds,” Fahey said.

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Supermarkets throughout New Zealand have reported a short supply of eggs as a result of the phase-out of caged eggs.

In 2021, Fahey told The Timaru Herald the association had been using golf balls, instead of eggs, for the carnival’s egg and spoon races as it “saves us having to boil up so many eggs’’.

“The kids quite enjoyed the lolly scramble at the end of each of the boys and girls categories of the races.”

Fahey said all-in-all the carnival had been running “very well” in the past few days, and it was great that people were showing their support.

“It’s great to see people coming in reasonably early for the carnival, all the rides have been running every day and the chocolate wheel has been running exceptionally well.

“We’ve had good weather too.”

Fahey said organisers are ready and looking forward to a 90-minute concert from Zed – the pop rock band behind the 2000 hit song Renegade Fighter – on Wednesday.

“There’s a good crowd this afternoon [Tuesday] for the concert and hopefully there’s a good crowd for the concert tonight.

“It will be a big day for us tomorrow.

“We hope that we get a good crowd and there will also be a donation box at the Zed concert with all proceeds going to Women’s Refuge.”

Meanwhile, the sand modelling competition for 0-12-year-old children also saw a good number of participants, the competition’s judge Sophie Clarke said.

“There were lots of families from outside Timaru who had come in just for the carnival which was awesome,” Clarke said.

“They did a really good job with the sand castles. The young ones were so good. They had about 30 minutes to build one and the 0-4-year-olds really stuck in there and built cool sand castles.

“My favourite was the mermaid and all the children were really keen to tell me the story behind what they had built.”

What really caught her eye during the competition was the effort the children had put into building the sand castles, such as the mermaid which Clarke described as “quite a large one”.

“Some children had gathered sticks, stones, flowers and shells and I also took into account the stories they told me about their sand castles. There were some fascinating stories.”

One of those stories was a boy from the 5-6-year-old group who had made a crocodile with little lakes around it and the crocodile was choosing which lake to go into.