50 Boating New Zealand
For Ari, the nerves start on the road trip leading into the
expedition and rev up again in the minutes before a new
challenge.
“When you’re looking at it, I get scared – but once I’m in my
kayak and actually paddling towards it, it kind of disappears.
You focus on what you have to do.”
Te kayaks and usually the paddles are bought of-the-shelf,
although some paddlers prefer paddles custom-made for length
and the blades’ angle of ofset.
“Kayaks with fat bottoms can be good for turning and
steering but if you come of a waterfall and land it wrong, that’s
how you break a back. If the kayak is round-bottomed, you can
do that of a waterfall and land a lot more safely but you lose
maneuverability sometimes. It’s always a trade-of.”
Te photos of tiny kayaks halfway down a plummeting
waterfall make good calendar shots but they’re only a small part
of adventure kayaking, he says.
“I don’t hunt out waterfalls. I’m more into big rapids, big
water that is technical. You might be in a rapid for fve minutes
having to do this, this, this,” – he digs in an imaginary paddle –
“whereas in a waterfall all you have to do is fall.”
Really?
“Tere’s a lot more to it than that,” he says quickly, “like
keeping your angle right and there might be something above
the rapid or a waterfall that goes into a waterfall that you have to
get right, but for what everyone sees and thinks ‘this is crazy-
difcult’ – the amount of vertical is not what makes it difcult.”
Whether a kayaker succeeds or crashes in a rapid or
waterfall often depends on how they enter it. Team members
take turns to fnd a viewpoint above the next stage in the
river from where they can pick the best route and to watch forpatterns in the water fow.
Sometimes a bump at the top of a waterfall might crop up
every few seconds; maybe that bump is to be avoided or maybe
it will provide a perfect bounce to line up for entry. Either way,
timing is crucial. So is trust in your team mates.
But even then the view from above is much diferent from
the view at water level. Ari tells of a 200m wide waterfall – I’m
picturing a mini-Niagara – with only a 20m section in the
middle leading to safe water below.
From fnal approach, the river looked nice and fat all the
way across and a kayaker missed the safe section by 5m. “He
was badly concussed and it completely blew him up,” says Ari.
Te kayaker survived, thanks to medivac by helicopter.
Ari’s closest-call happened on a casual afternoon paddle in
the South Island with a friend.
Both kayaks got caught in an eddy and a constant fght
to stay afoat as they spun around and into each other.
Eventually Ari used his paddle to shove his mate out, so that
he could go for help.
Ari was tipped out and taken down, down in a current to
the bottom. It was one of the worst scenarios: down into a cave
with relentless force from upstream. Ten, through another
submerged chamber and suddenly, a whoosh through an exit
and back to the surface, his kayak nearby.
Extreme kayakers worldwide number only a few hundred;
pretty much everyone knows everyone and tends to paddle in
established groups. Sometimes the kayakers are paid, perhaps
to check out a route for adventure tourism. Sometimes they’ve
received a grant for attempting world-frsts.
I didn’t ask Ari why he does it. Somehow, it just seemed like
a pointless question. BNZ