(written on the 11th from notes)
I went back down to the river pretty much first thing this morning, and ran into the British couple from yesterday. They were already parked down there as well. 🙂
Cool to see the Brits there again, and shocking to see the river.
It was so low. 😶
I jumped online to see if maybe the river had a cubic meter flow rate like that eiver near Wānaka that you could surf and boogie board on, and yes, that portion of the river did have a spillway that recorded the flow rate.
When I was talking to them last night, I think the flow rate was somewhere around 180 cubic meters per second.
This morning? 66. 😶
I’ve never seen the river this low. Holy. Freaking. Crap!
With the river being as low as it was, I decided I wanted to try and wade all the way across it, as it looked quite shallow.
As the sun shone down on the crystal clear water, it seemed to me that I could follow a path that would keep the water maybe a foot or a foot and a half deep.
Looks can be deceiving. 🙃
It wasn’t long before I was waist deep with a super strong current, having to lean up river so as to not be swept down river. But that made it difficult for me to see where I was going, because I needed to step behind me, but leaning forward, the ripples around me made it impossible to see where my feet needed to go.
I tried again and again, but every single time, the water would get about chest deep, and I couldn’t see where my feet were going, so I’d end up in a spot without a good foothold, and I’d get washed down river. 🙃
Fortunately, despite the strong current, just maybe 15 or 20 m down river was a little mini peninsula sticking out into the river, so there was a large dead spot that was easy to swim to. It also happened to be quite deep–well over my head.
So shallow was the water that you couldn’t reasonably jump in the river from the shore as I’ve been able to do every single time I’ve gone.
Of course, I tried, trying to land all strategically, just shy of doing a backflop, but I still touched bottom. 🙃
Despite not being able to Wade across the river nor jump safely from shore, I did enjoy the little swims in the deeper spot.
I think the water was probably somewhere between three and six feet below normal?
I’ve always been able to jump from shore into the water without any concern whatsoever, even dive.
Not today. 🙃
I spent a little while chatting with another couple that had parked next to me, and then eventually I bid farewell to them and the British couple, heading down river toward Huka Falls.
I wanted to go back to visit hookah Falls because I’d never seen it with the water so low, and I was curious to see what the rapids looked like at the spot where the river narrows significantly into a little shoot before going over the falls.
When the river is running higher, the water rages through that chute, and it looks like there are multiple places where you could maybe get stuck and sucked under and drowned, so I was curious to see if there were any visible rocks at this point.
So I headed on over, enjoying a little video call with my sister Heather while there, and found to my my delight that rocks were not visible in that violent Whitewater chute area, which meant that should one desire to float down the craziness, you wouldn’t have to worry about getting stuck in a hole of any kind. You just get dragged on down the river and over the falls.
😁
Yes, I have somewhat of a desire to do that. 🙃
No, I didn’t indulge my desire. 🤓
Would be quite a thrill, though. 😅
With the concern of boulders and whatnot out of the picture, the only real concern after that is coming back up to the surface after going over the Falls.
Would the power of the water hold you under? or would it push you away and up? Or would the water be so aerated that you wouldn’t be able to swim up at all and would have to swim down to get to unaerated water and then try to figure out while underwater which direction was away from the plunging water so you could get away from the super-aerated water.
My guess is that you’d probably be just fine, you’d go over the falls, and they push you down and beat on you and then spit you out, and you come to the surface a little bit later, away from the pounding water.
But I’m not that big of a risk taker, thank you very much. 🙃
I bid my sister farewell and headed over to Mitre 10 to work on my van a little bit more, wanting to be in the parking lot there out of the humid river valley, so I could work on what I needed to work on without humidity concerns.
When I got there, I started assessing everything, and I had bought that filler because that was going to be the very best way of repairing the issue, much more professional job, but as I thought more and more about it, I realized I was probably going to need to do a whole lot of sanding of metal in order to have the proper surface for the filler to adhere to.
I didn’t fancy sanding off more paint and exposing more metal. My history tells me that paint often doesn’t protect as well as it should, so the more paint I removed, the more likely the new stuff I put down would just let rust get to even more locations.
No, thanks. 😅
Anyway, so I ended up taking the filler back and deciding to just go the less professional route but the more likely to prevent future rust? At least doing a home hack job instead of a professional body work job.
So I got My tube of clear waterproof sealant and started spreading it out all over the place. Unfortunately, because it comes out of a tube via caulk gun, it doesn’t spread well at all. Since it goes down in beads, if you try and spread it together, it causes all sorts of bubbles which may or may not pop sometimes when they pop, they create little pock marks.(Or not’s a little pock marks 😅).
Anyway, I did my best to try and spread it around, but one of the other problems that I ran into was that since it was transparent, I couldn’t easily tell where I had put it and where I hadn’t. 😶
The result was pretty much a mess. 😕
Clear caulk was smeared all over the place, varying thicknesses and textures. Places where it was super thin. Places where it was thick. Places where it was all lumpy, places where it was smooth.
It was a mess.
But once on, gooey caulk isn’t something you can simply just take off..😕
So… That was that. 😞
I did the best I could.
After putting the caulk everywhere, I looked at the instructions, as I knew that it was a paintable caulk, but was then shocked to find that cure Time was 48 hours.
😶
8 hours, 12 hours, maybe even 24 hours, and I would have been fine, but 48?!?!
That pretty much guaranteed that I wasn’t going to be able to paint before the rain came.
[sigh]
Ugh.
I was supposed to have called my sister back to finish chatting while I worked on my van, but that wasn’t really reasonable once I got going. Or at least, it was a discouraging, frustrating process, so talking while going through that wasn’t quite what I was wanting to do.
Once I finished up what I was going to get done today, I called my sister back, and we chatted for a good long time as I wandered around near the Mitre 10.
After bidding my sister farewell, I’m headed back to my little perch by the river, just hanging out by myself not really talking to anybody down. 😅
Since I wasn’t going to be painting over the next couple days, I didn’t need to stay in a place with low humidity, so I decided to head back up north to the hot springs.
I got my van jump started, and then headed north, swinging by Huka Falls yet again because River volume tracker showed that the water level had gone down even more, so I wanted to swing by one more time to see what it looks like.
Once there, gratefully there was zero traffic (I forgot to mention that on the 1st drive over the traffic was absolutely atrocious trying to get into the parking lot. I ended up catching sight of a loan parking spot relatively out of view and in sort of an awkward place, and doubled back to get to it).
This time, after snapping some pictures of the river, the only difference seemingly just the reduction of ambient light, I decided to start walking up the path that hugs the far side of the river, going back several kilometers (all the way to Taupo!), stopping and snapping pictures along the way, and not really getting all that far on the path before deciding to turn back (The gates to the parking lot closed at 6:30, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time to walk the path).
From there, I headed over for a nice little soak at the Hot ‘N Cold rivers, a kiwi gentleman joining me.
I stayed soaking for a decent amount of time before heading over to the Kerosene Creek parking lot for the night.
And that’s pretty much the day!
Oh, foolishly, instead of just throwing away or giving away the last of my junk food (multiple bottles of soda and a few bags of chips), just plowed through it. 😅
The result was that a tooth on the upper left side of my mouth is really angry right now. Twinging on a regular basis and hurting with pressure. 😬
Really hoping I only pissed off the nerve, and it’s going to take a few days to calm down and not that I’ve managed to crack a filling or open up a cavity less than a year after my last dental work. 😅
Of course, it’s also possible that I could be staring down the barrel of a root canal.
I’m a fabulous flosser and a horrible brusher. I flossed probably several times a day, but I’ve only actually brushed my teeth a handful of times since coming to New Zealand, I think. 😅
Of the two, flossing is definitely more important, but I just… I just about never remember to actually brush my teeth.
Some sort of a mental block, I guess. It’s really weird.
Anyway… fingers crossed. 🤞
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 