West Coast - And then the rain came

Eventually, the rain did come, lots of it. The rivers were flooded.
We started off with Blue Bottle Creek, usually the river is just a trickle, in flood in truned to a chocolate coloured torrent with no eddies to be found, and rocks invisible and it took our first casualty, Ross took a swim after being caugt on some submerged rocks, his boat carried on downstream, hotly pursued by Toni, and was rescued, his paddle also floated off, not to be recovered until a week later when we returned to the river, which had emptied by then. Ross then had to walk out through though thick bust to get out.

Charlie B getting some air on Airmail on the Kakapotahi

The Upper Kakapotahi was next on the hit list. Despite advice from Yan, who had paddled the river before and insisted it was too high, me Toni and Steffan were determined to paddle it. After waiting a day for it to go down (about a centremetre) we got on at late afternoon. On the first of seven drops, Toni swam after getting stuck at the bottom of a drop, all was fine and we carried on through the second and third drop sweet as. The fourth and fifth drop, Postmans Falls and Airmail are known to be the hardest. We got to postmans and realised it was impossible to pick a line down the rapid from the boat. We had to climb up the steep walls of the canyon to try to have a look but when even this failed, we were forced to haul our boats out with throwbags and try and make our way to the road. The next day we were back with lower levels and this time conquered the river. Success.
That week continued with an awesome paddle on the Toaroah and another walk into the Styx.

Toni George drops in
Into the tunnel on KakapotahiWaterfall on the Toaroah