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Stories
Karamea
The crew was: Andy and Katie from Idaho, and Chris and I from Dunedin.
The chopper pilot was a good bugger Craig, who dropped most of our food at the Roaring Lion hut on his way back down the river.
The scenery was inspiring.
both blazing sunshine and howling rain, pretty much what you'd expect on the West Coast.
Part of the reason that we sped up our trip to two days instead of three was that it started raining heavily on Sunday
and we had deduced from previous flow data that the river would spike high quickly.
After the first rapid on the second day (the Roaring Lion rapid), we were a bit nervous about the river at a high flow.
Our original plan to paddle out on Sunday would have seen us paddling the lower gorge between 50 and 175 cumecs.
The
river starts out from Venus Hut as a granite boulder garden,
changing on the second day to Greywacke(I think) boulders
and
big chunks of rock, the size of houses or hotels (some humungous
boulders in the Roaring Lion rapid).
The
first day is mostly boulder hopping ,with a few tight lines
through drops and not a lot of water .
Only a couple of spots where you have to drag your boat down
shingles and Katie was light enough to paddle these.
We'd heard that this was potentially class 4-5.
The reality looked a bit unpaddleable from the top.
It starts out with a couple of drops that'd come in at about class 4 in the creek boats, but quickly becomes a mixture of rock-climbing-bank-scouting, tight-lines and quick reactions.
None of it was particularly hard, it just all had to be done without rolling, swimming or missing the line (which sounds like standard procedure for creeking).
I'm not sure how long the rapid was (some hundreds of metres maybe), but it took us 3 hours to scout and run it in sections.
There were a fair number of little drops and multi-move lines, with moves ranging from grade 3-4.
Lots of buffers and slamming against rocks.
Boat scouting from rock jams and micro-eddies, followed by optimistic lines worked pretty well for some of it ,
while other bits we had to send somebody down both sides of the river trying to find a line.
Click the pic for a larger view
Andy ran Katie's boat down with some token safety coverage from myself.
None of this was really difficult, but it was committing all the way down.
Katies walk was epic too, my feet were bruised and battered from climbing in river shoes back up it to try and spot Andy.
It's a worrying feeling to be safetying for the bit of a river where somebody might overshoot an eddy, or get pinned when you can't see them getting in, or running anything in the approach more than about 5m away - which also contains a bunch of manky stuff that you're assuming they won't go into.
I'd still take that option over trying to portage a boat round that rapid though.
Click the pic for a larger view
There were some great opportunities for drops and easy-classy paddling moves all around the show.
The Holy Shit rapid had three multi-channel pool drops that could be safely run on pretty much any line.
The 4th drop was an S-turn and a boof through two shoulder-height curly-laterals which was almost like a water-slide
(almost - except for the vertical pin penalty for going over the top or the slot-o-beating for slipping inside the line or the... you get the point - hit the line :).
Multi-day heliboating is wicked! (Helicopter rides by themselves are wicked!)
Also, Katie and I took some fly rods.
We didn't have time on the first day to stop, but the fish were rising at between 10 - 11 am above Karamea bend and there were at least two of baggable size in every pool.
I saw more fish than I could count - Kayaking's a great vantage point.
None of them were particularly worried about kayakers. (I had two within 3 or 4 metres of my boat hanging a foot or so beneath the surface at one point.)
It was hard to paddle past them and I'd recommend that anybody flying in to do the Karamea in the future stays over at the Karamea Bend hut and does some fishing on the first day because the boating is pretty mellow.
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