Andy and I completed a lightning fast run, after first getting bogged down trying to find a good take-out.
It was a week of changes. The Thursday afternoon trip to Nyagui failed to materialise, and the Pungwe trip was cancelled at the last minute due to Wayne having car trouble (which meant no shuttle driver from him and Ken is away in South Africa). Fortunately it had been raining the last few days, and Matthew called from the Shavas on Friday afternoon to say it was up at 1.7m.
It was a toss-up between the St Pauls run and the gorge, but as Andy hadn't done the gorge yet, that option won. The wave at the main road was working very nicely, but we didn't stop for a play as Andy was pressed for time. We set off for the gorge take-out to show our stand-in driver, Dzingai, the take-out. Having spotted a better take-out track on Google Earth than the one found by Ken last time, we almost made it to the river before getting a bit bogged on the edge of a ground-nut field. The winch was put to work and we decided the Landy would wait further from the river (400m walk). Unfortunately we had to head back through the same section, and even though we packed the muddy area with branches and used more speed, we got stuck again. Fortunately there was a tree within reach of the winch cable on both occasions.
Back at the old road bridge the locals were all very happy to see us. We had quite a crowd to see us off, with much ululating and laughter when we ran the first drop. Despite the rowdy sendoff, the trip was fairly uneventful. Andy isn't a big fan of portaging or bank-scouting, so we only stopped three times. After a quick look at the first drop ("Oh F@ck!") we ran it using the left bank chicken run. Then it was into the Gorge and Andy just went at it without so much as a "what's the line?". He did very well, except that I wanted to take more time on the two very nice play waves about halfway down. I did manage to spend a few seconds in each before racing off to make sure Andy wasn't getting himself into trouble. Andy avoided the hole on river right near the end of the gorge section, and we played on another wave at the exit from the gorge.
We soon arrived at the second major rapid which we portaged right. Andy had thought about running it, but when he saw the depths of the holes he demurred that portaging was wise.
The third drop looks good on the right, but the last hole is deep and retentive. There may also be an option to slide down the rocks near the left bank. After a quick bank scout we opted for a medium-sized chute up against the left bank, which starts as a trickle but builds quite a bit before it drops over the edge. There is a small chance of being pushed into a boulder on the left bank, if you start the drop too far left, but both of us made it look easy.
The fourth drop ("F@cksakes!") was also scouted briefly before we both ran it down the right channel. Both of us got flipped by the second stopper, and recovered before the pillow wave. I allowed myself to be pushed up against the rock to test the danger and it would seem that even if you were upside down the force isn't much. In fact, the pillow wave deflected me away from the rock without me even touching it.
We tried another play wave further down, which was a little fast and flushy, before we drifted down to the final runnable drop - a river-wide slide with a nice tongue to ride through the stopper on. We took out soon after on the right bank, loaded up and headed back to thank Matthew for calling us. The run only took us 1.5 hours.
The short drive home was punctuated by beef rolls and discussions about Gairesi, Musengesi and other runs to be tried soon.
Here's a picture of the river just above the main road bridge.
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