Huka Falls

wow, alot has happened since the last blog...
we stayed in Rotorua for a few more days - running the Kaituna river almost every day, ( i think we ran it a total of 13 times). Really nice river; a grade 3/4 with big drops, jungle-like vegitation and a couple of good playspots.
After this we headed down to the Taupo region to tackle the rivers there; these included doing the Tauraga river, both parts of the Rangittaiki River, Full-James playwave, Huka Hole and most recently Huka Falls.....this was awesome, definitely the scariest thing ive ever done!! -

Running this waterfall was really the reason for being in Taupo, although unfortunatly, on arrival we found the river to be at its highest velocity meaning it would be a suiside mission. We thus waited the whole of 3 days for the waterlevels to drop, just camping alongside the river and eagerly watching the river gauge. Finally, about 10am on Sunday morning, the river had lost enough volume to make it runnable ....
We drove down to the tourist-viewing bridge where we could scout a line through the 200m's of whiewater above the falls. The bridge was swarmed with toursists... it made it very hard focusing on the river and calming nerves with people all around whispering amoungst themselves and pointing and gasping as they began to cotton-on that the 3 of us in kayaking kit were about to run the Huka Waterfall. It was a bit surreal walking our boats to the put-in; you could feel the eyes of the countless tourists on your back, hear murmers of "insane", "crazy" mixed with the numerous pats on the back and good lucks.
The best part of all this attension had to be the group of awe-struck American girls who insisted on helping us get ready and filming the whole event for us.

The lines were fairly straighforward and a nice 'recovery eddy' had formed on the left 15m from the drop. This didnt really help to calm my nerves though, i was terrified! We ran it together, as a group of three with about a ten second gap between each of us. We all made it safely through the rapids and over the fall to the cheers of our audience overhead.
What a buzz! Im still shaking thinking about it!