The Herbert River T.R.

The river was amazing, we did quite a distance though, and had alot of long days. We put in at Cashmere Crossing, the river was just touching the bottom of the bridge. It had been drizzling all morning and it was rather chilly when all 8 of us got on the water at about 11:30am after the 4hour drive up. Some friends Kevin and Trish did the shuttle for us, taking our cars to Abergowrie.

This day was mostly flat with one very long stretch where we ended up in a channel left of the river itself and struggled through trees for about an hour. We found a really good flat sandbar and camped. Day two was almost immediately more exciting, before long we were above the first portage. Trevor Robertson ran the drop/ramp below this and got quite trashed. We all portaged after that... The weather cleared up and we had perfect warm sunny days from here on. We did the big portage at about lunchtime, heading up onto the ridge and then following a steep gulley into the rain forest below. We camped here. A few of us headed up to look at the falls, carrying our boats up three rapids and the portaging one of them on the way down - too many rocks.

Day 3 dawned in the forest after a spectacular nights sleep on the soft ground. This day was the most spectacular with many awesome falls, gorges and a couple of portages. Next time, we will bring our stupidity pills and run the bigger falls! Just before lunch, we ran a really beautiful small fall, Jackie bashed her shoulder in this rapid and then bashed it even harder in the next one, a simple class III boulder garden with a drop at the bottom. They called a time out, Paul, Luke and I ate muesli bars in our boats and waited, and waited... Much to our surprise, Jackie and Trevor were talking about walking out. We pulled up to find that Jackie had really hurt her shoulder, possibly breaking or at least doing some hideous ligament damage to her shoulder.

Scott, Trev and Jackie packed their bags, left their boats on river right and proceeded to walk out. Up the right hand bank to above the falls, crossing there and hopefully working out the rest along the way.

Luke, Paul, Russel Withers, Mark Silburn and I continued on down, cautious as ever, fearing that another injury would mean we all had to walk out. We did a big portage past a set of two beautiful falls (will run them next trip). The next two days are a blur of spectacular whitewater, boulder garden rapids and running drops blind. It has to be some of the best whitewater I have ever run. After Blencoe (we arrived there late on day 4) the river truly became fantastic, the volume of water increased and there were innumerable class II, III, IV boulder gardens, that slowly spread out further and further till we got to the take out at Abergowrie. On the last day, we surprised two freshwater crocs, both about 2.5m long.

When we got to our cars, we found one missing and a note from the crew who had walked out. It turned out they had some good luck and met one of the landowners on their walk out. They beat us to the cars by half an hour. We met them back at the Cardwell Van Park, they were all smiles and planning the walk in trip to fetch the kayaks. Jackie still hasn't got her shoulder XRayed, it is probably just some torn ligaments and maybe a small fracture. The next morning we celebrated Trevors 60th Birthday at the local bakery, jumped on our bus to Townsville and caught our flights home to Brisbane.

Simon Vos
31st July 2006