Tubing the Pelorus

TUBING THE PELORUS The best trip ever?

Photos: Kevin Cole and Ian Harrison

W e’re all completely clueless compared to you, Harry.’ Now that’s the kind of comment I like to hear! It has a nice ring to it. It rolls trippingly off the tongue. It gladdens the heart. It makes a man feel happy. It bears repeating.

‘We’re all completely clueless compared to you, Harry.’

The speaker was Illona Keenan and we were floating lazily side-by-side on inner tubes in a languid pool on the Pelorus River, having just come down a long, bouncy rapid in which several in the group had capsized.

Twenty-four years ago I tubed the Pelorus River. Back then the trip appeared regularly on the club trip schedule in January at Anniversary Weekend. I only did the trip once but some people did it year after year. BJ (Brian Johnston, or Peter Jackson as he was back in those days) must have done it ten or a dozen times. But then the trips died out, and so it seemed did knowledge of the area and of tubing in general in the club.

Now I was back. Looking behind me I could see our leader Spencer Clubb in the distance at the top of the rapid in his fancy yellow Canadian pack-raft, stuck on yet another rock. The Yellow Submarine, we had inevitably dubbed it. The bow was high in the air, and as I watched it slowly upended, Titanic-like, and Spenser was toppled backwards in slow motion into the water.

Kevin Cole was already in the water, floating down towards us, clinging to his tube with one hand, his paddle with the other. A few seconds later he was spat out of the rapid into the top of the pool and thrown up against the cliff face at the side. He fended off with his feet, then was swept sideways with the current down past some half-submerged rocks, and came to a halt in a backeddy where he hauled himself ashore onto a convenient boulder beach.

Next Megan Banks came floating down in the middle of the rapid, spinning around wildly, trying to control herself with half a yellow plastic paddle. She had snapped the paddle in half earlier in the day. She slipped sideways across the final large standing wave, somehow stayed on her tube, and spun to a halt in the pool beside us.

Then it was Ian Harrison’s turn. He came bouncing down a narrow white-water chute close to the bank, lying back on his tube, swinging his paddle about, feet flying in the air. Attached to his helmet his movie camera was filming the scene for posterity. Then he too was flung off in the water, arms and paddle flailing wildly. He was washed down through the big standing waves into the middle of the pool and paddled his way across to the boulder beach where the others were now regrouping and clambered up out of the water to join them.

Finally, a few minutes later, Spenser came bobbing down towards us, the Yellow Submarine floating upside down in the water behind him, and he too dragged himself ashore on the boulder beach beside the others.

Meanwhile I just lay back on my tube and relaxed in the sunshine, eyes closed, hands trailing lazily in the water, drifting slowly in circles in the eddy and waiting for the others to sort themselves out yet again.

‘We’re all completely clueless compared to you, Harry.’

The trip had begun the day before from the Aniseed Valley Road, in the hills south of Nelson. We had walked in up Hacket Creek and Browning Stream to Browning Hut, where we stopped for lunch. Our loads were heavy— as well our usual tramping gear we had a large collection of truck inner-tubes and plastic boats, wetsuits, extra warm clothing, flippers, paddles, life jackets, helmets, pumps, dry bags, and numerous assorted plastic bags and pack liners.

After lunch we sweated under the unaccustomed load up to Totara Saddle and down the long sidle to the Pelorus River. Roebuck Hut was situated in a grassy clearing across the swingbridge on the far side of the river. It’s funny how memory plays tricks on you—I was sure I remembered the hut being on the near side of the river, on the true left! But I didn’t let on to the others - it probably wouldn’t have done much good for my status as the only person on the trip who had done the Pelorus River before!

We spent an hour or two before dinner inflating our craft. I had my trusty old truck tube which had been sitting unused in the basement for years. Spenser had brought his pack raft—a small inflatable rubber raft with an enclosed spray-skirt decking. Kevin and Megan and Illona had brought inflatable plastic Warehouse boats. They looked distinctly flimsy to me, but I didn’t say anything. They had also brought truck tubes as spares, just in case, a wise precaution as it turned out.

Most of the others had brought helmets and lifejackets but I hadn’t bothered. I’ve never used them on any of the other tubing trips I’ve done and am not convinced they’re necessary. A paddle, on the other hand, is an excellent idea. It definitely helps to have something to propel yourself along with in long, slow pools where the current disappears completely. But you don’t want something too long as you have to carry it in, and you don’t want something too expensive in case you break or lose it. I had tried to find a cheap paddle at the Warehouse but with no luck. In the end I bought a pair of cheap toy flippers and figured I’d be able to use them somehow. At the hut I found a length of timber and fashioned a paddle out of it by attaching the flippers to the ends, but in the end I decided it was too heavy and unwieldy and didn’t take it with me down the river.

Next morning we were slow to get away. We packed all our gear away carefully in our packs. Some people had drybags, others plastic bags of various sorts. Illona had two large new pack liners. I’ve never trusted drybags— no matter how carefully you do them up they always seem to leak if submerged in the water. I used a triple layer of large, tough rubbish bags, knotted closed at the top; inside, my sleeping bag and spare clothes were done up in yet more plastic bags, just to be on the safe side! We donned our wetsuits and carried our vessels down to the boulder beach beside the river. My wetsuit, hurriedly bought from the Warehouse a couple of days before, proved to be a size or two too big, making me look a bit like the Elephant Man with layers of sagging skin. Still, I wasn’t complaining. In the past I’ve never bothered with a wetsuit on tubing trips—I’ve just used multiple layers of polypro and I’ve got by, but I’ve usually ended up feeling pretty cold. Now I can’t imagine how I ever managed without one. It took some time for people to sort their gear out and get the set-up of their tubes organized. The river looked cold and uninviting; it was milky coloured, not the lovely crystal-clear water with a faint blue tinge I had been expecting. Worryingly, it seemed to be up. There had been heavy rain a few days before and doubtless that was the cause. It looked big and scary and mean, certainly more daunting than my vague memory of it from over two decades ago. And I’ve done a fair amount of tubing over the years – it must have looked positively frightening to most of the others.

Finally all preparations had been made, all gear stowed aboard. We had no more excuses, no more causes to delay. It was time to go! Off we set, into the water, into the first pool, down the first rapid. And almost immediately there was a capsize, then another one. It was slow going as people got used to the tubing and made adjustments to their craft. I think Spenser and I were the only ones who had done any tubing before. In the first hour quite a lot of people came off and already the Warehouse boats suffered some damage.

After about an hour we came to a serious gorgy section studded with rocks. I pulled ashore on the right and scrambled forwards along the bank over rock shelves and boulders to investigate. A hundred metres ahead was an evil-looking chute where the river was squeezed between a vertical rock cliff on the left and giant boulders on the right and foamed out under a log and down a nasty drop. It looked completely awful! I didn’t remember anything like this from my previous trip and I think I would have! Maybe it had been formed by a slip or a flood over the intervening years. And we were only an hour into the trip! What was the rest of the river going to be like? I was the one who had put the trip on the schedule and I had assured everybody it was a piece of cake but now I began to doubt my own memory.

There was no way we were going to tube this bit so we carried our tubes down over the rock shelves until we were opposite the final chute. The problem now was how we were going to get back into the river. Down to our left the water churned through a sieve of giant boulders. Just up ahead was calm water in a big deep pool but we couldn’t reach it – further progress along the bank was impossible. Then Illona found a way, jumping out onto the rocks in the middle of the river and sliding down into the pool from the forward prow of one of them. I got some lengths of cord out and we lowered the boats ahead of us, then followed them down into the water. Good teamwork had seen us through.

‘We’re all completely clueless compared to you, Harry.’

The phrase ran through my mind again as we stopped for lunch in the sun on a rocky beach after another couple of hours in the river. I hadn’t come off my tube once so far. Everybody else had come off multiple times and there had been several mishaps with the plastic boats. I had been ahead a lot of the way and in several places I stopped and waited a long time for the others to catch up. When they did I maintained a nonchalant air of gurulike calmness and wisdom. Vast experience and superior skill, I silently allowed the others to believe.

Actually, the secret was simply in the way I had positioned my pack.

On tubing trips most people sit in their tube, legs dangling in the water over the front. This is a good stable method, you are low in the water, but your feet tend to act as a rudder and you have a strong tendency to swing around backwards, unable to see what is ahead—a very disconcerting experience when you’re shooting down a rapid! And it is awkward to know what to do with your pack when sitting this way. Some people wear it on their back, but it makes you top-heavy and restricts your movements. Some people cradle it in their lap, but then you have a strong chance of losing it overboard in rough water! Some people even bring an extra tube for their pack and tow it along behind like a trailer.

On previous tubing trips I have generally used my own method in which I have tied my pack securely into the hole in the middle of the tube. You need a small, squat pack to do this—an old Mountain Mule style pack is best, not one of these new-fangled modern toothpaste-tube ones. Being tied in, the pack cannot get lost and float away, and you can if necessary even sling it over your shoulders with the tube still firmly attached and walk. In the water you lie across the pack on your stomach, face forwards and downwards; your feet act as rudders behind you, keeping you on course, and your arms are free to paddle breast-stroke. And your pack protects you from any sharp rocks from below; these can be a painful experience if you adopt the usual approach of sitting in the hole! This is an excellent way to travel—there is nothing like floating along lazily in a long, slow pool, face forward, only inches from the surface, looking down through the clear, transparent water and watching the bottom of the pool drift slowly past, executing an occasional lazy paddle every now and again to keep you moving slowly forward. But it can be scary—or exhilarating—to shoot down rapids this way, like an Olympic luge racer, face out in front, projecting forward over the front edge of the tube, watching the rocks and waves approaching full on, getting drenched and submerged, almost gulping the water as you rush forwards. And you are definitely more unstable in this position; your centre of gravity is higher in the water and you have a strong tendency to slide off—especially when you are shooting down a serious rapid and an evillooking cliff face is hurtling right towards you!

On this trip different people used a number of different arrangements with their tubes. Spenser sat in his pack raft, the enclosed deck drawn around him, his pack attached on top of the deck up front, evenly balancing the weight. It seemed a well thought-out system, but for some reason Spenser had a strong tendency to get stuck on rocks and get up-ended. I guess it was because his legs were fully enclosed in the raft, so he wasn’t able to use them to fend off rocks or quickly stand up in rapids. Kevin used a cord looped around the middle of his tube to turn it into a torpedo-shaped craft, narrow and pointed with two compartments, one at the front and one at the back. He tied his pack into the front of the tube, pointing up and out like the bowsprit of a yacht, and sat in the back with one leg either side of it. Unfortunately the constriction of the cord caused the tube to become misshapen and balloon out in a huge bulge at the rear where he was sitting! Megan and Illona began the trip in their plastic warehouse boats with their packs placed aboard alongside them. The boats didn’t proved up to the task and after a few hours they had abandoned ship for their tubes, but for a while they still towed their packs along in the boats behind them, like a caboose.

On this trip I had adopted the BJ approach. BJ’s approach is to attach your pack to the back of the tube, horizontally on its side, half floating in the water. This way it is low down and helps to stabilize the tube. Being half submerged it also acts as a rudder and keeps you pointing downriver. And since you attach it firmly by the shoulder straps and waistband you cannot lose it and you have your hands free to use a paddle, or to hang on to the tube, or fend off from rocks as the circumstances demand.

Using this approach I found I was able to shoot down rapids and feel completely stable, while the others were capsizing and falling out all around me. My noble craft felt like a majestic Mississippi barge, calmly and placidly sliding down the bumpiest rapids and wildest chutes, through big standing waves and over mini-drops.

‘We’re all completely clueless compared to you, Harry.’ Well, maybe not so clueless once they caught on to the reason for my advantage! After lunch most of the others joined me in adopting BJ’s method and the going became much better with fewer stops and much less mucking around.

There are two huts to stop at on the Pelorus. After a long afternoon we finally sighted the Middy Creek swingbridge. Middy Creek hut, the first of the two, was out of sight a few minutes away up on the right bank. We were behind time, it was late in the day, we were feeling tired, and the fun was beginning to wear off. We thought about stopping here, but after some discussion we decided to carry on down to Captain Creek hut. Captain Creek was the original planned stopping point and if we stopped at Middy Creek we would have a long day the next day and probably wouldn’t get out to the roadend on time.

Downstream from Midday Creek we entered one of the most enclosed and gorgy sections of river on the whole trip. There was one long stretch where we found ourselves being funnelled steeply and rapidly down a very narrow gorge, the walls close and high on either side, like a water boat ride in a Disneyland fun fair where some fiendish engineer had designed things to provide maximum thrills and spills, to give you a real fright and ensure you got splashed! But unlike a fun fair, this was real! I found it slightly daunting looking ahead down this section. You were going fast, there weren’t too many places to clamber ashore if you came out, and if you lost your boat you wouldn’t have a hope in hell of climbing out up the gorge walls to the tramping track high above. You would be stuck in the water with no option but to be swept along downriver for a long way before it eased up. Right in the middle of this section the river was funnelled over about a two-metre drop. I briefly began to regret not having a life jacket but it was too late to worry now! Thank God I had a wetsuit! Did I really come down this section twenty years ago? I certainly didn’t remember it! All you could do was sit back, line the tube up, point it in the right direction, keep to the middle of the flow, and hang on tight! But tubes are good solid craft - I slid down through the white water of the cascade and emerged out into the pool at the bottom completely unscathed! Yes! I had done it! Ye-ha! Woo-hoo! That was great! Looking back behind me I watched the others come down over the drop one at a time. Most came through ok, though I think one or two did came off.

It was also in this stretch of river that I had my only capsize of the whole trip. We were coming down a rocky section when we approached what seemed to be a waterfall up ahead. I was in the lead. Being low in the water it was hard to see exactly what the river was doing. All I could see was that it disappeared from sight. Was it a straight drop? Was it bouldery? How big was it? Was there a pool at the bottom? Maybe there was a log jam? It was impossible to know. There was a boulder beach on the left and really I should have pulled up well before the drop and checked it out. But it was the end of the day and I was feeling tired. I just couldn’t be bothered. Maybe I was feeling cocky; maybe I was overconfident. A few metres short of the drop the flow split in two and there were some boulders and gravel in the middle. It looked like a good place to stop. Just keep going and pull up there, I told myself. But when I got there I found to my alarm that the current was far too strong and I couldn’t stop! I was swept along, out in the current, over the top. And now I saw to my horror that the river plunged down almost vertically over what looked like about a four or five metre drop, crashing down between huge boulders on either side! Boulders to the left of me! Boulders to the right of me! I was frightened, but there was absolutely nothing I could do! I clung on tight for dear life and— half in the water, half in the air—somehow tried to steer the tube down! Fortunately there was a pool at the bottom, not rocks! I plunged down into the water, and unbelievably I was still on top! Yes! I was going to make it! I was going to come through unscathed! I had done it! But then I lost it and was thrown off into the water! Damn! Under I went, and my tube was swept from my grip. No! I couldn’t afford to lose my tube now! But then I came to the surface and there it was, thankfully still there, only a few metres away, caught up against the face of a huge boulder out to my left. I lunged over, grabbed it in one arm, and dog-paddled on down the pool to a spot where I was able to touch bottom and stand up. Hurray! I’d made it! I was wet, I had destroyed my no capsize record, but at least I was in one piece and all my gear was still there!

Then I looked back up river and was amazed to see Spenser and the Yellow Submarine coming over the brink behind me. He had obviously decided that if I could do it, so could he! He couldn’t have known I had actually intended to stop at the top. Possibly I had looked cool, calm, and collected as I went over the edge, instead of feeling scared stiff. He came toppling out of his raft and ended up in the water at the top of pool. I stood there in the water watching stupidly while the end of a broken paddle came floating swiftly down in the current towards me and disappeared off downstream before I could think to grab it.

After that, all the others wisely decided to portage around that drop!

A bit further on the river opened up and we came to Captain Creek Hut. It was up on a grassy terrace on the true left, at the back of a wide boulder beach on a broad convex bend of the river. The setting somehow seemed familiar to me—this was how I remembered Roebuck Hut! Obviously I had mixed them up in my memory over the years. We hauled our tubes up to the hut and hung all our wet gear out to dry in the last rays of the sunshine before the sun disappeared down behind the hill. Packs and wetsuits, pumps and plastic bags, socks and boots and jackets and helmets lay scattered around on the grass and over bushes. Dry socks and layers of fresh polypro were retrieved from the hidden depths of pack liners. Kevin extracted a sodden sleeping bag from a drybag that had failed to live up to its name and wrung it out as best he could. Then we all retreated to the dry, warm interior of the hut and a welcome brew. We had got off to a slow start but Day One of the trip was successfully behind us.

Day Two began more smoothly than the first. We were more organized now, more experienced. Everybody had followed me in adopting BJ’s method of carrying their packs, and the plastic boats were no more to be seen. We packed up our gear, clambered into our damp wetsuits and were away early, before the sun hit the river.

This second day the river had fewer big rapids and more long, slow pools compared to the first. For long stretches we floated along slowly, deep in the sunless shadow of the gorge, hemmed in by the rock walls. It was in these pools that I regretted not having a paddle, since there was virtually no current and it was awkward and tiring trying to paddle with my arms. Once or twice I grabbed hold of one of the others and got a tow. Occasionally I adopted my old technique of lying flat across the top of the tube face down and paddling breast-stroke. (Mind you, most of the others’ paddles were reduced to broken pieces by this stage after various mishaps the day before.)

On this day I was able to take greater note of the river and the surroundings, since I wasn’t so busy looking at the rapids. It was magic just to be cruising along on this beautiful river, surrounded by bush, lost in the middle of nowhere. Gradually the sun penetrated into the depths of the river, first in small patches at odd corners, then in longer and longer stretches as the morning advanced. Late in the morning we saw some trampers at a point where the track descends to the river.

Finally around midday we spotted a bridge over a side-creek on the left which marked our exit point from the river. We stopped and hauled ourselves ashore on a broad, sunny boulder beach. I felt pleased to have successfully completed a second run of the river, but sad that the trip was over. It had seemed like a short day and I almost felt like continuing on down river, round a few last bends. (Checking with BJ later, he confirmed that twenty years ago the trips used to continue on a few more kilometres downriver and get out at Tinline Creek, and I think that would be a better option, although it would make for a longish day.) We peeled off our wetsuits and lifejackets and lay them out to dry in the sun. We deflated our tubes. We were in no hurry—we had plenty of time. We sat and ate lunch in the sun. Spenser and I went for swims down the rapids. Then finally it was time to go. We scrambled up to the track at the end of the bridge and followed up to the roadend high above the river, where we had a long wait for the van to turn up. As we drove out down the valley road to the main highway I looked down at the river flowing along far down in the depths of the valley and thought to myself that if only there had been time I could have happily continued the trip for another day, all the way to Pelorus Bridge. Maybe even all the way to the sea.

And so ended an excellent trip with a great group of people. The river had seemed a lot gorgier than my vague memories of it from a quarter of a century ago, but it had been great fun. I felt privileged to have been able to come back and do the trip again after so long. Tubing is a great activity, and the Pelorus must surely be one of the best tubing rivers in the country. Hopefully the trip will find its way onto the schedule again next year, and the next after that.

‘This was the best trip ever!’ Megan exclaimed enthusiastically at the end, and I am almost inclined to agree with that.