Shoalhaven River – Oallen Ford to “A-Spring Creek”

Shoalhaven River – Oallen Ford to “A-Spring Creek”

Level: 1.38 Hillview BOM gauge

Team: Kevin, Oli, Jiri, Tim, Markus, Andrew.

Time Taken: 2 (very full) days

The Shoalhaven has been on the cards for so long, but it’s so rarely runable that this chance could not be missed.   For once nature conspired with us for a great weekend of epic paddling. After much negotiating Oli had secured keys for critical access gates the level was dropping nicely, I had just arrived back from Perth and the trip was on.

 
HOME for the night..

The shuttle took longer than anticipated after being attacked by a ferocious magpie (amongst some other minor issues) and on the water at 11:30 we were.    The flatwater section was a warm up and then onto the more commonly paddled power-lines section.   It was bigger and classier than I remembered and my fully loaded boat was handling like an oil tanker – not the nimble creek boat I remembered. When Oli described this section as “grade 2 in comparison to what lay below” the mood changed to “apprehensive”.

 

The quality and the size of the rapids can’t be explained  - you have to go there. It’s all good. There were rolls, good lines, bad lines, portages a brief swim onto a nearby rock and some great camping and a welcome fire.  In the morning we felt we hadn’t made enough distance so we committed to an early start. As we were about to put on to the river we found that a Werner paddle has been split on the previous days paddling. Duct tape and tent pegs kept the paddle together although Markus had to do some creative paddle strokes with no bracing.

We set off at a cracking pace, which only lasted until a unlucky seal launch ended up with a boat and paddle floating off into a big eddy. No problem – except for the foam. The entire eddy was filled with about 3m high of dense pollution foam, and the boat and paddle were somewhere underneath.  Paddling into the foam we soon realised that this was a unique but serious situation.  You couldn’t paddle into as soon as you tried to breath you would end in a fit of coughing and confusion. A walk out was looking like an option. Never before had a kayak been lost in such a flat, safe, yet impossible to access spot of water. Jedi mind tricks paid off where dragging tree branches, ropes, snag lines had failed ad Yoda used the Force to spot the boat and paddle and were back on the water.

We portaged the big waterfall and continued on downstream with Oli warning us of the big one that looks like a grade 2 was “somewhere” ahead.  We paddled down some great rapids, some apparently with “nothing in them” that left us wide eyed.

 

With our rush to get going before the short days ended we paddled past our preffered get out, had a couple of map conferences then decided to keep paddling until we found a defining feature to identify our position on the map. As daylight was fading we found an unlikely ridge to walk up.  We missioned up forever. The ridge was an excruciating exercise in pain and endurance. Walking on compass bearing and following ridge lines after around 4 hours we finally hit a road.  Two of us went for a now mid-night run to fetch the car, while the others made an instant petrol driven fire to warm up.  Some careful map reading and out of the cold mist the car appeared.  Boats on and back to Oallen ford to pick up the other cars that by then had a thick layer of ice on their windscreens.  3:30am and back in Sydney in time for work at 8am..

All up a fantastic trip which was made possible (and even pleasurable at times) by having all the right gear and keeping positive joking till the end.