Tubing trip number one - Saturday 11th of December
By Bruce Dudley

We met at the Hunter carpark at about 9am and drove down to collect our tubes from the gear shed. The day had turned up pretty cool and grey. It was the sort of day on which had you gone to the beach with the intention of swimming you would instead have ended up sitting on the damp sand in your jeans, twiddling your cold toes and watching the clouds rolling up over the sun from the south and the seagulls picking over seaweed.

It had been raining on and off for the last couple of days, which was probably good for the trip. Hannah, who had tubed the Hutt Gorge the previous week, had told this week's tubers over beers on Tuesday that there had not been enough water in the river when she did it, and that at times their party had had to shuffle themselves and their tyres over shallow rapids in order to get downstream.

We split into carloads and headed off, agreeing to stop to inflate the tubes at the Caltex on the main road though Upper Hutt. Our car was slow getting going and by the time we arrived the air pump been taken over by the cars of Andred, Craig and Sam. A ute filled with hard-looking bastards and dogs was circling the service station waiting for them to leave, and another car was parked beside the carwash. Our car joined the group and helped fill the tyres, patch those that were punctured and stow them all away. Mat tied three good big fat ones to the roof of his stationwagon. The ute with the dogs in it stopped circling the service station and left. Normally in a situation such as this I would feel pressure to hurry up and get moving, but today our use of the Caltex air pump was more than routine tyre maintenance. Today we knew that that pump was our ticket to a hell of a lot of fun. Everyone was quite contented and very busy talking, pumping and patching and no one paid the guy by the carwash much notice until we were done and ready to drive off.

We headed towards our entrance point, near the filter station at the top of the Hutt gorge. I had been calling for people to wait and go in convoy but had everyone left without us and we got away last again without knowing exactly where we were going. Although I had been helping to organise the trip my geographical input had been limited to looking at the map with Kieran and pointing to a red line that headed to the right place. The map we were using was a topographical one and didn’t have street names on it, and we were fortunate that that red line branched off State Highway 2 and was called ‘Filter Station Road’.

As soon as we arrived Andred and Sam dropped off their tyres and drove out of the carpark again. Andred’s car was to be left at the exit point from the river so that at the end of the trip the drivers could be ferried back to the filter station. Those of us who were left waiting for them to return donned our wetsuits and helmets, claimed the best tubes and chatted in good humor to people walking past. Kieran took time to inflate an enormous plastic Warehouse-Orca and attach it with yellow rope to his tire. Mat gave faulty directions to a group of businesspeople in Santa hats looking for a purple flag on a swing bridge, while I recommended tubing this river to two enthusiastic Koreans who claimed at length and without ever using the letter r to be Australian. They asked first in true traveler fashion where I was from, and said that they would try to get out tubing before they left the following week, but that maybe it would have to wait until they got back to Australia. They asked where they could get the tubes and, perhaps in an accidental slur on our fashion sense, whether or not tubing was dangerous enough to warrant wearing a bike helmet. I said Beaurepairs truckstop in Kaiwharawhara, and that headgear was probably sensible. I hope, in hindsight, that they were careful in the selection of their river. It strikes me that a rafting device in which your backside pokes tantalisingly into the water may not be suitable for all Australian rivers, and might severely reduce the relevance of a helmet attached to your head.

Sam and Andred and Ben rolled up while Mat was off peeing in the bushes. He was peeing in the bushes despite the fact that there was a concrete toilet complex beside the carpark. I pointed this out to him when he got back and he looked innocently at it, and said, ‘Oh. So there is’. Still waiting, Mat shook himself, smoked a cigarette like Marlon Brando and grinned evilly and without reason at Ben, who was prodding his tube. Andred sat in luxury in the middle of the carpark, testing out his two-tyre rig which had a 20 inch truck tube as its base with a small one stuffed inside it to shield him from shallow rapids. Sam dressed himself in a wetsuit that was too short in the sleeves and too big in the legs and hunted the carpark, pawing through the useless tyres we had left for him in search of something that would save him from sinking. Finding one that was too small for him, he sat on it anyway and started smearing on sunblock. Cornelia, standing in the sun in stately Romanian calm, stayed silent and put on her wetsuit. We drifted down the steps to the river and set out our equipment in bunches and roped up rubber tangles on the sandy bank.

Andred tested out his rig to see that it would float, and it did. He drifted off slowly down the river towards the first riffle. In groups and one after the other we paddled off after him. Guy took time to arrange his two tubes as he floated along.
Everyone bounced down through the first rapid, and the second and arrived at a deep swift pool with a rock wall on one edge, dripping and covered in moss and with trees above it. On the other side of the pool was a gravel bank. Andred was calling to us from the bank to come over and talk about river safety. After the first two rapids some of the multiple tyre arrangements that had been created to offer their riders greater comfort had already come apart. Several people were floundering in the current of this pool while their unruly tubes spun off downstream without them. Those on the bank offered instructions to the drowning victims on the best way to retrieve the tyres and get ashore.

When we had all clambered out Andred duly gave us his safety briefing, ending with emphasis that we should not attempt to stand up in rapids mid stream.

Immediately after setting off again we ran into a reasonably rough piece of river. Amidst the chaos, whoops of delight and tumbling bodies Sam climbed onto a rock in the middle of the river without his tyre, and Cornelia obeyed Andred’s final instructions to the letter by holding on to a rock with her arms while she was dragged out full length under the water. She was drowned to the point where she was unable to hang on any more, whereupon she tumbled for a bit and popped up downriver pale and physically unharmed.

We set off again after a long conference, of which the main purpose was to convince Cornelia that she would almost certainly not die if she continued, and that all she had to do was relax and stay towards the rear of the group, so that she would not go flying first and unaided over any really dangerous rapids. Ben said aside to me that she should probably head back now, but I replied that I would stick by her, and I was sure she'd be alright. Whether or not she would have survived the whole way we shall never know. A couple of rapids down I came round a bend to find Sam perched atop another rock in the middle of the stream, again without his tyre. Behind him, the source of his discomfort, was an drop of about a metre onto a log. The log spanned the stream and had branches poking out of it, which must have been quite uncomfortable for poor Sam to have landed on. How he clambered back up from the log onto his rock against the falling water I can't imagine. Craig told me that it was quite a process, and that he got beaten up pretty badly. The rest of the group circled around this rapid, and handed our tyres down a rock face in order to continue. Cornelia sat watching the rapid and the clambering and the expression on Sam's face and decided that it was time for her to leave. By this stage, however, some of the party had shimmied down the rock face and set off again. This left half the party on top of a rock half way down a steep gorge dealing with a Romanian who wanted to be teleported back to Romania, and the other half floating off down still further down the stream. The only way for Cornelia to escape the gorge at this point was to retrace her steps back up the banks of the river. Mat, Ben and I decided that we would go back with her and then raft back down as a separate group. First, however, we had to let those further downstream know what had happened, and tell them that they need not wait for us. I set off downstream, and found that Sam had been beaten senseless on the next rapid as well. The group had stalled around the next bend and were spread out on both sides of the river. I yelled out to them what was going on, and asked Sam if he had had enough. He had. Craig, who had stored Sam's car keys in his bag hurled them across the width of the river to us and sat down with rest of the group, who had decided that they wanted to wait. Sam and I began picking our way along the base of the gorge carrying my tyre and Kieran's Orca, which had escaped from its rope and was beginning to get on his nerves.

Mat, Cornelia and Ben had started off upstream without us. We set off after them straight away but it was not long until we ran into trouble. I leaped off a rock upstream into a deep pool with steep sides, carrying my tube in one hand and the inflatable sea mammal in the other. I found quickly that the footing under the water near the bank was extremely slippery and the only way to get out of the pool other than being swept downstream was to climb using my hands. Thus I couldn't get up the bank without letting go of my precious tube or Kieran’s Orca. Realising I was stuck like a spider in a bathroom sink I yelled out for Sam, who had been standing on the rock from which I had leaped, to come and help. Sam turned up to help me about the same time as I escaped. He had sensibly taken a detour through the bush on the side of the gorge.

We caught up with Ben, Mat and Cornelia after around 20 minutes. They had taken considerably longer than us, and Ben and Mat had had to carry Cornelia through some parts of the trip upstream.

Ben had found a way out of the gorge via a steep mossy waterfall that fell down into the river through thick bush and scrub. At the top of the waterfall there was a stormdrain pipe that went under the road to the filtration plant. We clambered up the rocks, dragging the Orca. Sam took his keys and headed off after Cornelia, back down the road to his car.

Mat, Ben and I scrabbled back down the waterfall and hurried down the river to catch up with the remaining 6 tubers. When we arrived, the 9 of us headed off again with Andred in front, to pick the rapids that were too rough and that needed to be skirted around on land. At the next of these, Ben pointed out that Craig was starting to look very cold and was having trouble moving. He was wearing only a loose-fitting short wetsuit, and the several long stops in the Southerly wind were starting to show. Someone asked Craig if he was OK, he answered along the lines of...
'No, I'm pretty bloody cold'
Ben asked him something about hypothermia, and he said
'Yer, maybe a bit'
We stopped and Andred took off his long wetsuit to swap with Craig. We loaded him up with a woolly hat and extra polypro and got moving as fast as possible.

A little further downstream, when we had all been paddling frantically for a while to warm up, we passed a Paradise duck on the bank with one fluffy duckling in tow. The duckling was plodding happily along behind its mother and how it came to be in the next rapid upside down with its little feet in the air beside Kieran’s tube I do not presently know. Certainly no one from the group went to get it, so I can only guess that it lost track of its mum for a minute and took of after a tuber instead. It spent the next 2 1/2 hours trying to climb on board tubes and being flung off whenever we went through a rough patch of water. Everyone was very worried for it, as it was pushed under the surface at regular intervals. From time to time we figured we had lost it, but it kept righting itself, peeping madly and struggling over to the nearest tyre. Mat borrowed my best black woolen hat and put the duckling in it to keep it safe. That was the last I ever saw of my hat, but the duckling just kept popping up and hopping onto the nearest leg or bit of rubber.

Towards the end of the trip we were slowed down by Scott and his two tires. His original setup had disintegrated and he had been reduced to slotting himself into his two small tubes and hopping and rolling over shallow rocks.

When we finally arrived at the exit point carpark and dragged ourselves ashore, someone discovered that the bunch of keys that had been flung so perilously over the width of the river to Sam several hours before had also contained the key to Andred's truck. Sam and the keys, as far as we knew, were now at a party somewhere in the Wairarapa. Ben rang for Sam, and Mat set off walking up the road back to his car, clutching the duckling. He was worried for it. It had gotten very wet, and it was shivering and peeping. The rest of us stood around miserably, swatting at sandflies and deflating tubes. Craig gave a good, but unsuccessful attempt at getting to the warm clothes and blankets stored in the truck. He tried to pop up the door latches using a piece of flax. As the chances of getting in with the flax began to look slim and time dragged on, we moaned for a good coathanger and weighed up the benefits and cost of beating in a window.

Mat turned up, eventually, with Cornelia in the passenger seat and the duckling, now named Archie, nestled happily in her lap. Sam was not far behind. We had had a hell of a trip. I don't think I've had so much fun in a long time. As I write this, at my home in Karori, I am being distracted by a little duckling running around my feet. I have fed it bread and water and it follows me, squeaking when I get too far away. The only way I can get it to shut up and go to sleep is to let it snuggle up next to me. I will take it to the SPCA in the morning.

Thanks to everyone who came along everyone and who helped with the organisation and transport.