100 Years Flood, Again

Mud Flood:

Most Rain in shortest time, ever, in New Zealand (northern anyway).

 

Last time I was at anchor in Daniel’s Bay, Nuku Hiva, when I storm rolled in that turned a vacant ridgeline into no less than 37 waterfalls, entire plantations of bananas and coconut trees were lost, roads vanished.  Daniel said it was the worst flooding in his memory.  And he was old, and he has since passed on.

 

Nine months ago I was safely at anchor as the flood waters rose and receded.  Today I am ashore.  But I am no longer on ground—I am in the mud.  For two days it has been raining, rain like a southern summer thunderstorm, where the clouds open and solid water drops as a wave from the sky.  But it wouldn’t pass.  Oh, you’d think it would, but it would come back all the stronger.

          It has been most enjoyable.  How can I work?  I found a few things to content myself about the cabin, a little fancywork here and organizing there.  But a new neighbor with an exceedingly fine DVD collection lent me a handful of disks just before the rains started in earnest.  It seems divine providence.  I have kept the tea hot and the computer running.

          This morning I finally ventured out.  Too much of a good thing and life becomes mundane.  Dressed in full foulies I was not at first surprised.  Nothing special, much rain.  But then I found a boat on the beach, broken mooring chain.  So it really had been blowing out there.  Then I noticed that every dinghy on the dock was full to sinking with water. My god.  That’s simply not normal.  Down by the beach the 12” runoff was pressured with water, spouting it far from its end.  I walled the coast trail to find it collapsed and hardly passable.  In my seclusion, much had been happening.

          I was surprised to find a new stream running past the bow of my boat.  I didn’t understand until later the evil portends this minor slide held.  The bow of Araby is butted up against an embankment with Richardson Road just above, and part of the steep embankment had given way and slide under the boat and now water was streaming freely there, threatening to bury my anchors, chain—even my dinghy which I had leaned there.

          Thankful that I had risen from my sedation in time I moved my remaining gear out of harms way.  I laughed out loud about such a ridiculous thing: a boat in a flood while ashore.  Dense, I still didn’t realize the full implications of what was happening, what could happen.

          I looked around the boatyard to tidy any things of Doug’s that could be washed away.  It was still raining hard, but the windy part of the storm had now passed.  There were at least two streams in the yard now.  As I looked again at my boat, a crashing. . . more a gurgling, mushy sound issued from above me and, amazed, another slide tumbled, burbled down to my feet.  “My god,” I thought, this is getting outrageous.  It wasn’t dangerous; it was small.  But it was starting, dimly, to dawn on me just how stable everything was.  New Zealand is a very hilly place.  You could say the land aggressively fights the influence of gravity.  But the addition of a few million tons of water, and the land quails and gives way.

          I walked up to the road to the understanding that, yes, this is pretty bad.  Each way I looked I could see downed trees, debris, and masses of thick clay smeared across the road.  One slide was so massive I had trouble getting through.    And this is just a short dead-end road.  The road to Paihia is far worse. 

 

Terry is a friend who runs a yacht charter business off the dock in front of the boatyard and lives high on the hill above, the hill that is quickly leveling itself.  He had heard that the road to Paihia is blocked in five places and the road to Whangerei is flooded worse than anyone can remember.  Essentially, we are trapped.

          I went home to get dry, have some tea and laugh about the whole mess.  Half naked, as poured my first glass, I felt a shudder and heard some strange noises that I couldn’t understand, and now can’t even remember properly.  My credo is Constant Vigilance, but one would think you could be a bit more lax when your boat isn’t even in the water.  Dense, you see, I still didn’t get it.  I couldn’t imagine anything serious, so I figured just shorts and a coat would do.  No boots.  I went out and checked the bow.  The boat looked clear.  No worries.  Ah, but there was a new slide, just to the left of the other one, part of the road even.  Oh, and the older one was really flowing now.  I noticed that a pile of wood and sleel railings were being overcome and pushed over my cradle.  Actually. . . indeed, this is a problem—now, finally, things start to move in my head.  The cradle doesn’t look right.  Actually—it looks broken.  It is twisted.  How the. . . Serious indeed.  I now wished I had my boats.

          I should take a moment to describe the deal.  Imagine a railroad track that leads down into the water.  A car rides down those tracks and the boat floats up onto, or into it, a cradle on wheels.  Imagine a cradle like a logging trailer: there are two uprights on each side of the boat connected by two main beams, a beam between the two forward uprights, and a beam between to the two aft uprights.  The two beams are connected by the metal frame of the car, and, I think, two cross beams.

          When the slide intensified and started moving the wood and spare rail, it slide into the forward main beam, on the starboard side.  The pressure was so great, it pushed the car itself backward and partially off the track.  There was another boat on the track behind me, right behind me, inches behind me.  First my windvane hit his bow pulpit, then the pressure, still mounting bent my windvane until its bottom bit hit his bow roller and stopped all reverse progress.  This is not a good thing.

          But, as far as I could tell, the cradle itself was broken—the main beams, both of them, seemed snapped.  How else could they twist like that?  This meant that at any moment the uprights could give way and my boat would fall over, unsupported.  This wouldn’t be a good thing either.  The thing to most surely be destroyed would be my rigging, which is only a few days old.  Ironic.

          So my neighbor and I went about, barefooted with 2x6’s, digging them into the foot-deep clay and supporting them under the rubrail.  It was only later that I figured out that the main beams were not in fact broken.  Both were severely twisted, but still servicible.  So my boat wasn’t going to fall over, and this was a good thing.

          But now at least, finally, the gravity—no pun—of the situation was upon me.  For a while there I believed Araby might fall over on her beam ends.  Bloody serious business.  Now, I needed to be concerned about my windvane.  The bummer here was that there was nothing to be done.  Cinderella, the boat behind me was all that was keeping me from sliding perhaps further.  And at this point any change was to be considered bad.  The amount of damage done to the vane was done already.  It was in stasis.  The mud, however was not.

          Rumbling above; another slide.  We all ran clear.  It didn’t make it all the way to the yard, but it appeared that Araby was right at the head of a shoot, not a happy place.  We’d have to cross our fingers.

 

I had readjourned for my tea when I heard Terry calling outside. He informed me that all of Richardson Street had been ordered to evacuate their homes.  Two five thousand gallon tanks high up on the hill were feared to be unstable and would come this way.  He said, if I wanted, I could go and stay on one of his charter boats.  I didn’t much care for this idea but didn’t want to be a bull headed fool either.  He said he was on the way to the yacht club as a policeman was going to be there and update everyone on what was happening.  Venturing forth once again seemed to be the prudent choice—I could carry the tea.

          Donning my betrodden wet foulies I bushwhacked my way to the yacht club, tea in hand.  The place was packed.  Not only were all the Richardson Street folks there, but apparently there were numerous people stranded in purgatory: all roads anywhere were closed, all power down, phones down.  Apparently the army was trying to find a way through.  Ah. . . a war zone!

          I watched a bit of the news, but there wasn’t much really.  Some of the worst flooding in memory, yadda, yadda.  The rain was supposed to let up today.  A high to the west and a cyclone to the north had created a sort of funnel with unlimited precipitation (from the cyclone).  Well, at least that made sense anyway.

          I left and walked down to the docks to see some friends.  I had heard that Ashby’s—the other boatyard—had let a 45 footer fall out of her cradle to the ground.  The wind being the culprit, I think.  This is a sad thing and I wanted to go see for myself.  I didn’t make it.  Because of the rain, when I arrived aboard some mates were knee deep in a bottle of rum and beers.  The older folk staggered home and left Dave, Kathy, and me to pass the story candle around the table and recite a tale of any nature or veracity.

 

 

A few hours later, I am now back home.  I can still hear the water running where it shouldn’t be running.  The rain is still slightly falling, a mere drizzle.  But what is truly amazing was the color of the water in the bay as I walked home.  Just amazing.  I’ve seen turbid rivers silted to that sort of milky brown—but never a great body of water like the bay.  It appears thick enough to walk on.  And everything perfectly calm, no wind, no lights no sound; and you can smell the mud, the soil, the land suspended, being carried out to sea on a high, high tide.  An awesome thing. 

          So perhaps tomorrow, if the sun comes out and the water stops this running, I can get a shovel out and start digging.  Doug and I’ve got a cradle to fix, a windvane to straight, boats to move—but nothing happens while we’re knee deep in heavy clay.  And it doesn’t look light I’ll be driving anywhere any time soon.