Well, another mission down. Recently spent 10 days in the stunning south island of NZ on a whirlwind visit to the amazing creeks of the west coast and New Zealand’s largest kayaking event of the year, the Buller Festival. We hit the road for the all night drive/ferry from Rotorua to make it to the first of the Buller Festival events, the extreme race. We rolled into Murchison at 7am on Friday after covering 750km and a 3hr ferry ride with a couple hours to spare before the action began. The extreme race was a lot of fun, I charged through the heats but local girl Jess Brown took it out in the final, yeah girl! and one of our crew Brad Loader won the men’s. Not bad considering the lack of sleep. The rest of the weekend was a good time thanks to the amount of rain falling and filling up the rivers. We were treated to some of the local runs in flood while elsewhere they were holding slalom events, and changing the course every ten minutes due to the rising river. Unfortunately the high water levels also meant that they had to cancel the big air ramp competition which was a bummer. All in all great events, parties and masses of people, everything a good kayak festival should have. The festival was just the beginning of our tour however. We had a solid group ready to hit the spectacular creeks of the west Coast. After setting up camp in the town of Hokitika, we soon made plans to hit up the first of many rivers the next day. The rivers of the west coast are world renowned and definitely have a unique style. The scenery is stunning with crystal blue waters (although cold from the snow melt), surrounded by large mountains, rare wildlife and native forest. However, you don’t often get to take in the view due to the often continuous grade 4 & 5 rapids formed through narrow gorges with enormous boulders to maneuver through. The dangers of west coast kayaking are apparent as water often flows into undercut boulders and trees causing many hazards to avoid so scouting rapids and setting up safety are a big part of long days on the river. But this is why we are here, we’ve come for the challenge and the rush we get from maneuvering these awesome rapids. Part of the beauty of the west coast rivers is how isolated they are. Sometimes we had to walk into a river for over an hour with all our gear, occasionally you can drive shuttle but the majority of the time, you need a helicopter to get to the start of a run. “Heli-boating” - possibly the best kind of boating. There’s nothing quite like sitting in a helicopter, flying up the river you are about to paddle down and trying to scout the rapids. “It doesn’t look that bad” FACT: The rapids are A LOT bigger than they look from the helicopter….. all good! The rain from the weekend brought the rivers up and on our first day the sun started shining. We had ideal water levels, getting all the runs at above average flows as the water slowly dropped throughout the week. Between us we ran 8 different rivers in 6 days, 5 heli-runs, 3 swims, several beatings, a 36ft waterfall amongst many others and were absolutely exhausted by the last day. A fantastic trip, we got a lot of footage for upcoming videos and all got to challenge ourselves on the best NZ has to offer. For more info & Pics check out: NZ STH ISLAND NZ%20S.Island.htmlshapeimage_2_link_0
LU Urwin Maruia Falls.JPG
Perth River Heli-Shuttle.JPG
LU Bullerfest Xrace.jpg
Brad&Sam xrace final.jpg
Crew at styx.JPG
Yeah right Styx put in road.JPG
Tyler Styx.JPG
LU Arahura.JPG
Matt Dents Falls Arahura river.JPG
Sam Curtain call Arahura River.JPG
Sam Cesspit Arahura River.JPG
Perth Sam filming.JPG
Whitcombe Heli-Shuttle.JPG
Irish Barry Whitcombe River.JPG
Sam&Ty Capture Hoki sunset.JPG
Dylan Maruia Falls.JPG
Jamiee Maruia Falls facesmash.JPG
Sth Island NZ Creeking < SLIDESHOW