It’s a big one… Although a tasty blue colour it looked deep, and with a fair few speeding ripples on the surface. The notes say you can cross it at Low Tide. But as our luck seems to be we got there just after High Tide. Cookie got stuck in to test it while I filmed, and all look good til the dark blue bit where Cookie slipped in up to his armpits. Sauntering back, ‘think we better walk round :)’ he said, ‘i don’t think you’re gonna like that bit!’. We could of sat it out in the sand and waited for the water to wain, but the sun was dipping and we had miles to cover so we ‘nipped round’ the scenic route and headed on to Browns Bay and the promise of refreshing beverages…
It was only a couple of hours past high tide when we got to the river. Decided to try and cross at the second spit which the trail notes said isn’t as deep as Dacre Point. I went out to test the water, before I even got to the other side I was in water up to my armpits (would be Nicky’s neck!), also the soft sand and outgoing current made me feel a bit unbalanced. Decided it wasn’t a good idea to cross, we could either wait up to 4 hours for low tide, or walk around to the bridge at the end of the estuary. The local Tony’s (what we call the little black oyster catcher birds) were going mental about us being on their spit, so we decided to walk round. On the map it looked like a mile and a half to Haigh Access Road, but I think the trail has been re-routed? It felt a lot longer and I started to think we should of waited for low tide.. Road walk to Browns Bay was pretty dull.
[…] Woo hoo! This was brilliant fun, worked much better than I imagined :) I’ve often wondered while fording some of the rivers over here, whether our Therm-a-rest Neoair mattresses would take the weight of our rucksacks and be usable as a makeshift raft? Would mean we could swim across while holding on to the Therm-a-Pack raft, even if it was too deep to ford like the Okura River. […]