Outdoors: Likely lads juice up paddle down river

By COLIN MOORE

You can't paddle the Whanganui River on porridge," said the Juice Boys scornfully as they prepared their gargantuan breakfast over an open fire.

An open fire blazed at the Ramanui Lodge campsite in defiance of the saturation of 24 hours of heavy rain.

A 1kg slab of bacon was forked into one blackened pan, a dozen eggs into another, and a couple of packets of crumpets, the closest thing to bread left after four days on the river, were toasting on the fringes. A few cans of beer, or "juice" as the boys called it, completed this real man's breakfast.

My companions looked on with a mixture of horror and awe as they tucked into a typical outdoors breakfast of muesli, or porridge and powdered milk, or fruit.

We had come across the Juice Boys, as we dubbed them, the day before - although unknown to us we had been following them down the Whanganui.

The four likely lads from Paraparaumu had put in at Taumarunui. Our party from Auckland's Alpine Sports Club had begun our river journey 58km downstream at Whakahoro.

Some had never paddled an open Canadian canoe before but there was several hundred years of combined outdoors experience among us. Two women in the party were 69, one a club member for 50 years.

We had all carried packs through North Island bush and tramped through the river valleys and alpine foothills of the South Island, boiled a billy beside a good number of streams and worked out our own preferences for what to carry and what to leave behind.

The tramping experience didn't count for much on the first day in a Canadian canoe but our mentor, Peter Sommerhalder of the Auckland Canoe Centre, was there to help us.

I was paddling Little Tree, my wooden strip canoe, with my eyes glued to the line Sommerhalder was taking through every bend and riffle.

I have paddled the Whanganui before but as forward hand to a highly skilled paddler. Steering my own canoe in anything but flat water was a totally different experience.

As well, Little Tree is a long and fast expedition canoe, low gunwaled and with a hull designed to be seaworthy in the wind-tossed waves of lake or inshore seas. The back-stopping waves of rapids are not its forte.

The first capsize of our party was before lunch. I might have yahooed but I didn't want to tempt fate. It made no difference.

At the next sizeable stretch of white water I followed Sommerhalder into the V of the rapid and the concentration of stopper waves.

It was too much for Little Tree. The waves spilled over the gunwales amidships and we were swamped and over in seconds.

Another lot of our party were swamped too but managed to keep upright until they could get to shore and empty out.

Still, the swamping was a quick and good learning curve. Keep to one side of the larger stopper waves was the obvious lesson. The other was not to disdain the use of a waterproof barrel to carry gear.

Kayaking "dry-bags" don't like to be fully submerged for long periods and I had a lot of gear to dry in the afternoon sun at John Coull Hut.

The river bank terrace where I last camped at John Coull was washed away but a new and fairly expansive camping area has been carved out of the bush.

Our hut companions were two Israeli couples. The men were Israeli naval officers who had just finished a six-year stint. We managed to talk into the night without discussing Middle East politics or the war in Afghanistan. We were thankful that a party of 28 schoolchildren the hut warden was expecting did not reach John Coull.

It started raining next morning so we took our morning break under the cooking shelter at the next campsite downriver and had our first scent of the Juice Boys.

The bush and undergrowth were sodden but there was the unmistakable smell and signs of a recent fire.

Perhaps they too had heard about the impending arrival of the school party at John Coull.

Their canoes were tied to the river bank at Ramanui when we arrived. They were each towing a tender made from a tractor inner tube with a plywood top and bottom and a hatch to gain access to these aquatic trailers.

Two of the men wore the black singlets and bush shirts that suggest hunters and so they were; experienced, too. Their paddling skills were probably no better than ours but they had come downriver unscathed, their trailers no doubt acting like a drogue.

This was a likely lads' holiday. When they left Taumarunui four days earlier their inner-tube trailers had held 16 dozen cans of beer. Now they were mostly full of empty cans.

But while we sat in a small hut cooking our tramping tack meals over a gas stove, Micky, Pete, Dave and Hutch, outside in the steady rain, cut and chopped waterlogged manuka and quickly coaxed it into a blazing fire on which to cook their sausages, beans and potatoes.

Micky, the hunter, never took a stove into the bush.

Lord Baden-Powell said the three Bs of life in camp are the ability to cook bannocks, beans and bacon. You can be sure our friends could.

I stood by their fire that night and its heat created an updraught that kept the rain clear of the flames.

Our Israeli friends stayed across the river at the Tieke Marae. In the morning the river had risen a couple of metres and we waited for them to appear on the bank and see their reaction. Perhaps naval officers don't learn that a log on the Whanganui river bank, no matter how large, is not a good thing to tie a canoe to.

Their canoes were about an hour's paddling downstream. Our host at Ramanui had found them on his way to pick up some lodge guests in his jetboat. He took the embarrassed Israelis downstream and added salt to the wound with a $60 fee.

At Pipiriki the landing was almost underwater. The Israelis grinned sheepishly, the Juice Boys filled a 44-gallon roadside rubbish bin with squashed beer cans and my paddling partner and I congratulated each other on having learned some new things from three days on the Whanganui River.

* colinmoore@xtra.co.nz


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