Mkomazi River 3-5 February

What a great weekend! The river turned out to be at a perfect level for us (1.7m) and despite some almost serious car-trouble (we only had 3rd and 4th between Tugela Toll Plaza and PMB) which resulted in a running pull-off followed by A-Team dive into the car at the Mooi Toll Plaza and an excellent "landing" (if I do say so myself) at the Shell in Hilton). Here we met Bry-Bry who had organised an excellent overnight bivvy with some snakes and a nice lady named Sue. The landing here was slightly more troublesome with low visibility, a strong cross-wind and a difficult final approach which required a dramatic side-slip maneuver... In the morning Bri-Bri's little 1300 towed our rather laden car back up the massive hill to the highway, and we landed safely (still in 3rd) outside Baby and Company on Victoria Road in Petermaritzburg. Bry-Bry and Snoo set off on a mission to find the missing link while Neil and I tried our best to make the problem more complicated than it was... Bryan-Snoo soon returned with the missing link(s), followed shortly by ace car-mechanic/bob-the-builder Mike Price, who promptly (well prompter than any of us could have done it anyway...) replaced our broken (plastic) gear linkage. With all 5 gears (and reverse too) back to working order, we set off at a furious pace to Richmond and Hella Hella to have a look at what we suspected was going to be a bit-too-high-river... Turned out it was just on the high side of perfect and dropping - not not good times. We managed to get on the river by 12 or so and ran 1 to 8 in about 5 hours (3 kayaks and 2 crocs) with minimal drama... Excellent stretch of river. Everyone did pretty well and the crocs flipped/swam once each (apart from the obligatory swim at Number 1). We ran the "commercial" stretch on Sunday - which had a pretty sweet wave (not great eddy service though) and some nice (relatively) easy rapids (except for the last one) to finish off a pretty awesome weekend...

- Daav