(written on April 2nd from notes taken previously)
I was up and out just before 10:00 this morning. First stop of the day actually wasn’t Paines Ford for once. 🙃
I stopped briefly off at the grocery store, since I hadn’t been able to last night, and then I went to Paines Ford. 😆
The water level was down a little bit more from yesterday, but only a little, enough to leave the upper ledge completely above water.
Like yesterday, I hung out on the ledge above, alternating between journaling and veging.
I didn’t really do much landscaping today, my torn back blisters from all the hard work yesterday discouraging further efforts (not that there was much left to do anyway).
While I was up there I watched as young man (teenager?) wandered around the wash below looking for a way across the river.
He was trying to cross just about the worst part so I called out to him from my little perch, directing him to go up river a little bit more where the crossing was much easier.
With that advice, he successfully navigated that branch of the river, but he gave up trying to cross the next branch. After giving up, he walked all the way back, recrossing the branch I’d directed him across, and then disappearing into the bush on the far side of the river.
🤷
As my time at Paines Ford drew to a close (I needed to leave by 4:00 to comfortably make it to Picton and the ferry by my scheduled check-in time), I decided to make one last jump from my beloved little perch above into the river below.
The water was clear enough that you could just about see the bottom in the deepest spot, but not quite. The current, though strong, was safe, about the same strength as it was back in January when I was here last.
For whatever reason, I was a little nervous making the jump, but I eventually did, with my water sandals on, landing badly. 😅
Slightly painful. Not so fun.
Oh well.
Part of my reason for jumping, other than it generally being fun, was to take the opportunity once down there to do a rough measurement of where the water level was at its peak the other day compared to where it was when I first arrived on Thursday.
I figured it would be a lot easier to jump down and swim over to the ledge than to hike around and then crawl across the ledge. 🙃
So I made the leap, slammed hard into the water at a bad angle, swam hard against the current, so as to grab the dangling rope, and then I pulled myself onto the upper ledge.
The first part of my measuring effort had me climbing up the super thick rope, both feet standing on one of the huge knots in the rope and with one hand holding onto the rope and the other reaching high above me, as best I could tell, my fingertips reached just about exactly where the high water mark had been during flood day on Friday.
So… one of me, plus my extended arm, which basically meant elbow to extended finger tips.
One body length plus half an arm… about seven and a half feet.
Climbing down to the upper ledge, I next measured the distance between the upper ledge and the knot I’d been standing on.
Waist high… about three feet.
Finally, I climbed down to the lower ledge, measuring the distance between the lower ledge and the upper ledge.
Again waist high… another three-ish feet.
I couldn’t remember exactly how low the water level was the other day. I remembered that I could stand on the lower ledge that I think? has always been submerged every other time I’ve been to the Ford until my return on Thursday, but I couldn’t remember how far below that ledge the water level had been.
So I figured, at a minimum, it was waist high, and thinking about where the bottom of the big rope was in relation to the water compared to today, I felt like it could have been even further, maybe chest high.
My final rough measurements?
I figure that at the part of the river where people normally climb up the rope to get to the upper rope swing, at a minimum, the water level was 13 ft higher on flood day than it was the day before.
Wow.
Overall, I would say that the water level rose somewhere between 13 and 15 ft at its highest point.
That’s higher than my previous guesstimates that I was worried might be a little overblown. Nice to find that I had actually undersold the flooding. 😁
After concluding my measurements, I dove from the upper ledge into the water, swimming down river underneath Acid Test (I briefly tried to climb the route before giving up only a few moves into it 🙃), and climbing out in the normal spot where the lower rope swing is.
Since I hadn’t been back over to that side of the cliffs since the day of the big flood, I found myself yet again astonished at the difference in water level. The contrast seemed even more stark on that end of the cliffs. All of those enormous boulders were uncovered, and the difference between the water level where I had just pulled myself out of the river onto one of the boulders and the trail above that just the other day had been the edge of the river was… astounding. 😶
I had stayed at Paines Ford and delayed jumping long enough that by the time I got out of the river and climbed back up the hill to get my cell phone, there wasn’t really time for much else.
I needed to leave.
So I headed back down the hill, crossed the two little ditches, followed the side path out of the bush to the road, walked back to my van, wrung out my clothes, fired up my van, and drove away–wearing nothing but my skivvies (my heater on high, inflating my sweatpants as it dried them 🙃).
😆
I decided to pause briefly at Peloras Bridge just… because it’s a place of nostalgia for me now.
And then I headed toward Picton and the ferry, stopping here and there along the way to take pictures.
I had gotten the message that the fairy was going to leave about 45 minutes later than it was scheduled, but that I still needed to be there for check-in at the normal time (7:30-8:30).
As I was waiting in the check-in line, each time I put on my brakes, I heard the unhappy sound of grinding brakes.
😬
Once I got myself checked in and pulled all the way forward and stopped in my waiting lane, I grabbed my headlamp and headed over to my rear left tire to check out what was going on.
I hoped that maybe it was just a loose splash liner rubbing against my tire, but no such luck. I climbed down onto the ground and curled my body up underneath my van, and confirmed the unhappy news.
There was no friction material left on my brake pad, and my rotors were now being ground down each time I put on my brakes. 😬
Lovely.
There wasn’t much I could do there in my waiting lane, so I used my time to get my carry bag packed up in preparation for the four or so hours I would be spending on the ferry (you’re not allowed back to your vehicle once you leave it, so you need to bring everything with you that you want to have for the crossing).
I took some pictures leaving Picton, but blurry ones…
I spent pretty much the whole ferry ride sitting in the corner on the hard floor, cell phone plugged into the wall charging as I munched on snacks and veged out in front of my phone screen.
This ride over was much less eventful than the one 3 months ago. 🙃 It was also a differently designed boat, apparently no upper deck to look out from, and no carpeted floors to sit on.
Maybe because it was the night boat? Leaving at 9:00 p.m. and arriving after 1:00 in the morning, though with ours leaving late tonight, arrival to Wellington wasn’t going to be until somewhere around 2:00 in the morning.
Anyway, staring at my phone the whole time (other than some brief trips outside to see what things looked like and a few trips to the bathroom to relieve my overly hydrated self), the trip went relatively quickly.
After the announcement was made for us to go back to our cars, a large number of us congregated in the stairwell next to the Deck Five door, the warning stanchion thingy still in place.
I figured that maybe they forgot to remove it, all since it was still there after we’d all been told to go back to our cars.
But we all just stood there, silently waiting for someone to remove the barrier and let us proceed to the deck.
But no one came immediately.
Eventually, one of the men at the front of the line did what I had thought about doing: He moved the barrier on his own, opened the door, and went on through.
And we all followed him like cattle. 😆
Back on deck five, while sitting in my van, I noticed a couple of young women leave their car and find a deck worker.
When I heard him tell the young ladies that he would come back to them after everyone else had left, I was pretty sure I knew what had happened, because I had experienced it myself a few months ago.
Their battery was dead.
So I got out of my van, walked up to their car, and asked them what was going on. They confirmed that their battery was indeed dead, so I went back to my van, grabbed my spare battery and my jumper cables, asked them to pop their hood, and got them jump started. 🎉
They thanked me, and the deck worker, on his pass around, found their car to be running and confirmed with them that they were now good to go.
Next came the stressful part.
More stop and go traffic with metal on metal brakes. No freedom-camping places that could reasonably be expected to have room for me at a reasonable distance from the port (the nearest I trusted to have any space was 69 kilometers away 😅), but and I needed brake pads, possibly rotors as well. 😬
It was about 2:30 in the morning when I finally rolled away from the ferry, using my parking brake to slow and stop my van (much more challenging with a foot-pedal parking brake 😅).
I made the decision that it was going to be best to try and crash for the night at the local Repco. I checked, and the one in Petone listed having a set of the pads I needed in stock, so I hopped on the motorway and headed that direction.
Unfortunately, the turn off that I needed to exit on was closed, construction workers doing their thing, so I ended up driving over to the Repco in Johnsonville.
But that Repco’s parking lot was right off of a busy street, affording zero privacy for someone hoping to draw very little attention to themselves while crashing for the night. 😅
So I looked back on the map and saw that coming from the other direction, it looked like I could skirt the construction and go to the Repco that I had originally hoped to crash at for the night.
Gratefully, I was able to skirt the construction and make it all the way to the other Repco in Petone. I ended up driving about twice as far as I’d hoped, which meant a lot more braking, but what else could I do? 😕
I pulled into the Repco a little before 3:00 in the morning, parked in one of the stalls next to the road, purposefully didn’t draw my curtains (trying to attract as little attention to myself as possible), and got myself ready for bed.
Funny, the very first car that passed by the Repco parking lot shortly after I arrived was a cop. 🙃
😅
[sigh]
If a cop knocks on my window in the middle of the night, hopefully they’ll consider my predicament a reasonable enough excuse to give me no trouble for crashing in a business’s parking lot for the night.
🤞
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 