I fell asleep on Wednesday as rain battered my bedroom window. Tomorrow promised to be awesome and I had a few mates free for an adventure. I was excited…
We arrived at Public Toilet Falls having driven on several roads that we could have kayaked down to get there. We jumped out of our cars and ran to the footbridge.
WOW!
The river was higher than I’d ever seen it… huge crashing waves, large pour-overs and spitting rooster tails. I almost wished I’d brought my playboat for the Lower… maybe Maddach Special was just around the corner?
We hatched a plan to first paddle the Eden then head to the Upper Mawddach once it had dropped off a bit. The Eden was a good level and a very pleasant run, but looked like a stream in comparison. At the confluence, we looked back upstream at the last drop of the Mawddach and raised our eyebrows at the lack of rock showing – not even the big rock that usually separates the two channels of the drop!
We bobbed on through the huge standing waves, occasionally giggling out of sheer enjoyment. At the the take out there was some debate but we stuck by our original plan. Luckily for us, the river was dropping off quickly and we enjoyed a fantastic level with entertainment the whole way down. When we reached the last drop it was clear just how much it had dropped in the time we had been paddling, with the middle rock now at least a foot clear! It was still high though, and a couple of surfs were had in the hole at the bottom of that one 😉
A quick look at the gauge graph shows how high the river was that morning, and how quickly it dropped. It started to rain as soon as we got of the water, ad it looks like the river went mental again…
Today, I think I will move from the Nile to the Zam…
Dee-bezi here I come…
