First off I went cycle touring along the Western Explorer road, a 325km trip through the NW Tas wilderness (I was knackered afterwards). After that the paddling began with a trip down the Lea, a classic Tas run with nice granite bedrock drops which were still good despite very low flows. The next day we paddled the Leven canyon, which was also a bit low but had some awesome waterfalls, including the highest I've ever fallen off (about 13m). With rain forecast, we then headed off on a road trip to the West coast, where we caught the Little Henty river at an awesome flow (6 on the gauge on the bridge, after 30mm rain). After a section of G3-4 with a couple of pushy drops it eased off to a scenic float, with sea eagles and wedgetail eagles circling overhead, and a possible platypus sighting...

The next day we did some park'n'look at rivers which were too low, before heading off down south to the Broad river, which took 3 hours of driving around a forest to find (at least it was sunny, for the first time on the trip!) It also looked too low to me but Harry insisted it was a good flow and would hold its water. The next day we bashed through the forest to the put-in. The Broad is one of the steepest, rockiest, most tree-choked runs I've ever run, but had a lot of surprisingly good rapids, including two gorges, and even a couple of days after the rain was still at a high flow (possibly snow melt). It took 5 hours to reach the take out, by which time we were knackered.

The following day we went back to the Lea, for a practice run before the annual Lea extreme race which was happening the next day. The Lea was low again, and we spent some time memorising the least rocky lines through rapids. A further problem was that my Mamba was slowly filling with water--after over 6 years of use, the battering it got on the Broad was too much for it and it had split under the seat.

The next day was Lea race day. Even better, we woke up to heavy rain, and headed off for another practice run. The river was considerably higher though; some people walked out while a few of us carried on down some chunky rapids, and portaged Surgeon's falls (not the best race line!). The race was postponed, then cancelled unfortunately, but I did get a bonus run down the rarely-run upper Lea, a long G4 creek with a slightly chaotic group of over 30 people. The next day I left for NZ after an awesome week's boating and biking. Glad to be back in the warm though! Photos below (some photos from Bug, cheers!).