no safety for safety boaters

Written by ned

Tuesday, 17 June 2008 13:08

Another guest author on the rainchasing blog

tales from the geordie adventurer harry black, and his adventures in NZ...

"I arrived in auckland with no kit with me so had to buy everything. When you walk to buy everything, the sales guys dream come true they think your one of them 'all the kit full of shit' types.

Newly fixed up with the embarrasingly new kit I then headed south and bumped into a few other boaters. I hooked up with them to run
the kaituna then the wairoa. We did a few others runs in the north island and then on to the main business, south island..

bruce the heli pilot was the point of contact, I ended up being asked along with ted (another brit) to be safety boaters for a raft company, as they're not allowed to run class 5 without kayaks. Getting paid to run class 5 sounded like a good gig.

I haven't ever done saftey boating before, and nore had ted, so we aere ideally qualified ;-). After a quick briefing, off we went on the Whotoroa, a class 4 river we had'nt done on the west coast!! we are supposed to stay in front of the raft, putting on safety at different points down the river, but we then found that the rafts are fast as they dont eddy hop like kayaks naturally do on this kind of stuff. So there was no time even to scout and not even any thought of safety for the safety boater - shit scary!

Then the next day it was onto the perth river, a classic heli access class 5 trip. This time we told the guides that we needed to slow down as we don't know the river!

This river had just got its raft licence and is still being sussed by the raft guides. The last big drop is called 'corner pocket' (not commercally rafted). It looked like death, an 18m wide river going through a 3 ft gap folding over into a big violent recirculating eddy fed hole, all of which is heavely under cut!!! A walk at this level for the kayaks, but the rafts thought they'd give it a go. They flipped on entry and did the down time. One guy was gone for seventeen seconds ropes and rescue, then on to the second raft the whole raft was gone for a second the guide had his helmet ripped from his head but the carnage was'nt so bad.