Northern Australian Boating – Warming up again for 2012

its been a while since my last post, but the wet season is slowly starting to build back home here in Cairns Australia, and we are just starting to gear up for an incredible 2012 season.  A few month back i was lucky enough to score some unseasonable rain down in the northern NSW ranges around droingo.

its been a while since my last post, but the wet season is slowly starting to build back home here in Cairns Australia, and we are just starting to gear up for an incredible 2012 season.  A few month back i was lucky enough to score some unseasonable rain down in the northern NSW ranges around droingo.  Over the space of one weekend we scored a flood run down the lower Blicks consisting of read and run class 2-3 with some solid class 5 drops mixed in.  The next day we hit up one of the classics, the Beilsdown.  This is one amazing river, over a 22km distance there are countless class 5 drop pool rapids, and one monster waterfall canyon section with one of the craziest portage/ferries I’ve ever had to do.  Needless to say, on of the boys on our crew had one monstrous swim lasting nearly 2 mins of complete submersion after not making the ferry above a 15ft drop into a boiling cauldron.  Luckily he was okay once he got his breath back, but i dont think he will be doing it again anytime soon.

here is a video from the trip.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More recently, while we sat around starring at a dark sky waiting for the rains to really hit, Marlow Mcgregor and myself hiked up Behana Gorge into the lesser know upper reaches of the river.  Behana is a classic grade 5 steep creeking run, only 10mins out of cairns that is commonly run, however we normally only run from the Water intake down due to ease of accessibility.   On this day we set out on a mission, hiking and climbing our way up the creek for another few kilometres.  Our hard work had paid off, we where finally greeted with a nice clean 50ft waterfall and some amazing drop pool rapids, finishing off the big slide section of river know as At Your Peake, named after Dale Peake, a local boater who first D the slide back in 2009, and tragically died doing a first D on the upper limits of the Barron Gorge in 2010.

here is a vid from our day of exploration.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is just the start to our season, we are now more pumped then ever to start charging bigger and harder drops and have a few epic first d on the cards.

Stay tuned

Bondy