Tuesday 2 January 2024

Leader: Owen Cox

This trip was meant to be on 1 January but we put it off a day because the river was very high on New Years Eve. It was still a bit big on 1 January (60 cumecs early in the day, dropping to around 40 late in the afternoon). At this level the river is not really suitable for inner tubes and swimming.

We met up at the car park at 10am. We then walked the hour into the Waiotauru picnic area where we inflated inner tubes then walked down the Waiotauru to the Otaki.

I walked around a few rapids and floated the rest. Some shot a few more of the rapids, sometimes unintentionally. There is an easy section around Roaring Meg and another easier section for the last 3 km. We had lots of swimming. It was pretty cold at first so we were all glad we were wearing wetsuits. These are pretty much essential for gorge trips. We climbed back to the road via the steps near the Kaitawa Bridge at the bottom of the gorge.

The river flow according to the gauge at Pukehinau (on the GWRC website) was between 35 and 31 cumecs. The gorge section took us about 3 hours.

Those on the trip were:

Graeme Richardson, Lindsey Griffiths, Owen Cox, Paula Richardson, Peter Davis, Rob Dey, Yingjun Shelton, Awatea

Currently there is no photo album for this trip.