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Published: December 8th 2008
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Rafting the Squeeze
Squeeze rapid, the second rapid in the Mother section. Hello there! A lot has happened since my last entry, almost a month ago! I have been working hard, either on the river nearly everyday or helping the new restaurant come along. Between the restaurant and the river, I worked 8 days in a row, then headed north to do a 3 day river rescue course on the Rangitata River, then put in another 7 days in a row working on the Shotover River. After that, I had one day off, then worked another 6 days in a row. I was not expecting to get so much work here, it being my first season and all, but so far so good! But, not all is well, oh no...
Ladies and gentlemen, my hopes and dreams of a clean season have been ruthlessly dashed to little bitty bits. Since my last entry I have had more than a little bit of carnage, flipping twice in the last 2 weeks.
The first flip came on Monday the 24th of November. It had been raining all night and all day, and the river had come up to flood levels. The range we raft the Shotty runs from 8.5 cumecs to 70 cumecs.
With one cumec equaling one ton of water per second. Above 70 cumecs we are no longer legally allowed to raft, but luckily the river was holding at about 55 cumecs. Above 50 cumecs or so, we have to make a visual judgment call about rafting through the tunnel, due to there not being enough room to fit when the river gets too high. The alternative to the tunnel is a big stomping class 5 rapid called Mother-in-Law.
Between the main section of rapids, the Mother section, and Mother-in-Law/the Tunnel, there is a tributary called Moonlight Creek that feeds into the Shotover. With the added water from Moonlight the level was well above save Tunnel levels, so we decided to take on Mother-in-Law. I had only seen the rapid from video taken from the previous week, so all I knew was that you had to hold a hard left angle and charge from river right to river left, smash the hole, and hope for the best. After the first two boats went through and set up safety, I went with the next boat, hoping I would be able to figure it out as we went.
My poor Lithuanian
De-brief
A de-brief of the day, 8 boats, 3 flips, and one dumptruck. crew, who spoke hardly a work of English, had no idea what was coming. It is kind of difficult to represent "Big Fucking Hole" in sign language without offending someone unfamiliar with whitewater, so I just led them into the rapid blindly.
Right off the bat, i lost my angle, lost some river position bringing the boat back around, and BAM upside-down! I got my toe hooked into the tube in front of me, and managed to hang on. After a few seconds I managed to get out from under the boat, and the rest is just your average clean up story. Ropes everywhere, safety kayaker floating sideways into a rock with someone hanging on to the bow of his kayak, people and gear floating down the river.
The next two boats ended up running the rapid too close to each other and flipped off of each other after getting through the hole safely. The last two boats had one clean run and one flip, and by the end of the day I now knew why the rapid used to be called 50/50.
Good fun all in all! I no longer had a clean slate, but at least I could try and keep it to one flip this season, that was until last Thursday...
It was another high water day, it started raining that morning and the river was rising rapidly. It is hard to make a judgment call in whether or not to head into the canyon as it takes 45 minutes and the river can rise above the cut off in that time. After monitoring the flow all morning, we decided to go for it and hit the water around 40 cumecs and rising.
All went well, and by the time we hit moonlight creek the river was about 50-55 cumecs, a close call for going through the tunnel or not. Worrying more about a high-water tunnel run or a lowish water Mother-in-Law run, I wasn't focused enough coming into the rapid just above those two, Jaws. Reading the water wrong, thinking the lateral wave/hole in the middle would send me cranking towards a rock at the end of the rapid called the Ship's Bow I gave the boat a slight crank to the right just as I hit the lateral. I ended up stalling when I hit the lateral and my slight turn spun the boat hard sideways and I was upside-down before I had a chance to blink.
This was a shit place to flip, especially at high water. Jaws is about 100 meters from Mother-in-Law and the Tunnel, so a bunch of swimmers have a good chance of getting split up, either going through the tunnel or Mother-in-Law. Once that happens it turns into a major mission finding everyone, and the odds of injuries are pretty high. I ended up getting separated from my boat somewhere under water, hit a couple rocks, and came to the surface to the left of the Ship's Bow, an unpleasant seive-y place to be. I grabbed the bow of the rock and climbed up to see my boat and all seven of my crew floating down with it. I jumped into the next boat that came by and nearly tackled the guide, Nolan, out of it, just above scaring him to death! Luckily, one boat had two guides in it, and one guide, Deano, jumped onto mine and flipped it over. The other guide, Kyle, got three swimmers and went straight into the tunnel, overloaded and all. The other 4 swimmers were pulled out of the river above the tunnel, and we regrouped after the tunnel.
By this stage, the water had come up significantly and we got off the river as soon as we could. Luckily no one got hurt or swam through either the tunnel or Mother-in-Law, but it could have been much worse.
Well! Lessons learned on the river are always done the hard way. It is good to be working on a river where everything keeps changing and I've got to be on my toes at all times.
More to come soon, the new schedule has me with a couple of days off and it is high time to get everything updated!
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