Fourth of July

We avoided crowds on the 4th July public holiday and found some waterfalls to paddle off. Simon had paddled the Wind before when it was too high to run the main waterfalls section and he enticed us to the river promising lots of clean drops at the low level we had. The section directly below the high road bridge was a little boney, but there were some fun class 3/4 boulder gardens leading down to the first fall with a fish ladder on the left. The fish ladder is a series of small offset weirs with narrow lines and tricky to make eddies, the fall is usually unrunnable and is graded by the guide book as a 6. Sharon quite fancied running the fall, so scouted a line, sent me down to check it out and then followed – we both easily managed to punch the usually nasty keeper stopper with ease. Simon and Cheryl both ran the fish ladder & I walked back up and practised my eddy hopping too.

The waterfalls section was very impressive, there was a small enterance rapid, 2 drops, a rock slide and then a final drop. Simon, Sharon and I ran the first drops, stopping in the small pool above the weir so we could walk back up again. Sharon swapped over with Cheryl and took photos and video while we had a couple more laps on the falls. The video gallery has a video showing the 2 drops and rockslide, and the photo gallery has a selection of shots. More photos are available at http://foreignwaters.blogspot.com

After the adreanaline of running the waterfalls we were glad to get to the hot springs and sit in a pool of hot water for quite a while. We had a bottle of chilled Reisling that we'd picked up from a local winery and had a very relaxing afternoon. More rivers should have hot springs after the hard rapids.

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