Te Araroa Day 41, Retaruke Domain to John Coull Hut/Campsite

Starting km: 1237
Finishing km: 1276?
km covered today: 39?

With the big day on Saturday (check out me knowing what day of the week it was!) we'd given ourselves an easy morning's walk to go pick up our canoes.

We spent the early morning walking along the Retaruke River, which had swelled considerably and turned brown as a result of the previous night's downpour

On arriving in Whakahoro, we had a few hours to pass until our canoes arrived, so I spoiled myself with a cooked breakfast and a flat white at the Blue Duck Lodge's cafe while my tent dried out in the sun.

So enjoyable was the café that we somehow missed our canoes going past at 10:30.  And the canoe hire guy forgot that we might be at the café. So we only met around 11:15 when, simultaneously, I decided to walk down to the boat ramp to look for him and he decided to drive up to the café to look for us.

No matter, we'd soon loaded all of our possessions into waterproof barrels, tied them to the canoes, received a quick reminder of the safety briefing, then hit the river.

I started out in the back of one canoe (in the "steering" position) with Yvonne, while Paul and Leigh were in the other.

We turned off the side stream we'd put in on and had had just a wee bit of practice when we hit the first rapid. This wasn't one of the Whanganui's biggest (which are apparently up to Class 3 [not that I spend enough time on rivers for that to mean much to me]) but there were still standing waves of 50 or 60cm.  Yvonne and I made it through excitedly, if damply, but when we looked back Paul and Leigh were going for a swim.

Before too long, however they'd emptied the canoe of water, climbed back in and joined us once again on the journey into the gorge of the Whanganui and down to the John Coull Hut, our campsite for the night.