(photograph © Kiwidutch)
I’m still standing at the Waiau Bridge outside Hanmer Springs, New Zealand.
The Bungy jumper didn’t jump but I got some nice shots of the bridge surrounds anyway…
I turn to go and have walked a few steps when a familiar noise halts me in my tracks. a boat, but not just any boat, …a jet boat.
I was going to tell you all about Bill Hamilton, but when I went to look up some facts, I found that Wiki had written it wonderfully so I’ll quote directly from there (with a little editing for conciseness)
It’s well worth the read because this is an invention that was truly born out of the necessity of trying to get around a high country station and one of the wide shallow rivers that flowed though it.
Sir Charles William Feilden Hamilton (26 July 1899 – 30 March 1978), commonly known as Bill Hamilton, was a New Zealander who developed the modern jetboat, and founder of what is now the world’s leading water jet manufacturing company – CWF Hamilton Ltd.
Hamilton never claimed to have invented the jet boat. He once said “I do not claim to have invented marine jet propulsion. The honour belongs to a gentleman named Archimedes, who lived some years ago”.
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
What Hamilton did was refine the design enough to produce the first useful modern jet boat.
Hamilton was born at Ashwick Station near Fairlie in the South Island of New Zealand.
In the 1950s he set out to try to build a boat that could navigate the shallow fast flowing rivers where he lived. The rivers were too shallow for propeller driven boats to navigate as the propeller would hit the river bottom.
He investigated the American Hanley Hydro-Jet, a model which drew in water and fired it out through a steerable nozzle underneath the boat. Even when further adapted it did not work well. An employee suggested to have the nozzle just above the waterline.
When he took one of his early demonstration jet boats to the US, the media scoffed when he said he planned to take it up the Colorado River (U.S.), but in 1960 a Hamilton jet became the first boat to travel up through the Grand Canyon. The critics were silenced further when the boat also went down river through the canyon.
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
The jetboat was one of three things that transformed the way the New Zealand High Country, the First is of course at the very Top of the List, are the indispensable and highly trained Sheep Dogs, without who’s help, rounding up sheep over the vast distances and rough terrain of High Country Stations simply would not be possible.
The Second is the Jet boat, which enabled farmers to reach pockets of land that had only been accessible by long hard overland hikes or by vehicles that were regularly cut off by the rivers that navigated though the Stations large tracts of land and swelled quickly in heavy rains.
The Third innovation that transformed the High Country was the helicopter, Musterers (people who use the dogs to round up sheep) traditionally had had to climb all of the tall peaks, and then, with their sheepdogs, transverse entire ranges, working as a team to drive the sheep down to lower elevations for shearing, lambing or for feed when the higher altitudes were due to be covered in snow.
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
These days the bigger Stations have their own helicopters and the smaller ones will lease one for the duration of the Muster. A Muster done pre-helicopter generally took at least three weeks, now, with the musterers dropped off at the tops of mountain ranges and the helicopter to search out pockets of sheep in gully’s, the muster can be completed in around four days, depending on the size of the Station.
In the “old days” pack-horses would be bought up high into the hills, saddle bags and billy cans laden to the hilt with food, carefully prepared so that it could be easily cooked in one of the bivvy’s (a crude shelter usually of a lean-to variety) and dropped off at a designated spot for “cook” to collect and prepare for the very hungry musterers after a day spent hiking in the tops.
But enough of the Muster, and back to the jet boat…. Not only did the nations High Country farmers appreciate the jet boat, thousands of New Zealanders took to it as well for recreation, especially on the massive braided rivers that are an amazing geographical feature of the South Island.
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
If a Kiwi ever offers you the chance to go jet boating up one of these rivers, then seize the opportunity as fast as possible as it’s an amazing experience that you will remember for the rest of your days. Here’s how it works: First you will need three things.. life jacket, strong shoes and a shovel… You are going boating but you may be spending quite a bit of time walking if you aren’t too lucky.
Two experienced people are essential to the trip, the driver and the navigator… both know how to deal with the river, but have different jobs to do. This kind of river is a strange beast, braided pieces of water that may or may not be interconnected, mostly it can be compared with a Maze. There will be some dead ends, and the depth of the water will be anything between several feet and three inches deep, alternating regularly throughout the braids.
The braids of water will branch constantly and but since you will be going up river at speed it can be very difficult to know which of the branches will lead to the next patch of deeper water and a bigger braid further ahead and which the boat should take.
The driver sits at the wheel, gaging the depth of the water and adjusting the speed accordingly, the more shallow the water the faster you need to go. The Navigator stands up next to him for a clear view of the river, making split second judgments on which direction to take every time the braid of water splits … and the braids split incessantly.
Knowing the river well can help tremendously but since a heavy rainfall in the upper reaches of the Alps can change the water patterns and water flows in the braids within 12 hours, it’s also an art-form to be able to”read” the river. Sometimes though, there can be a certain amount of guesswork needed.
This massive fluctuation in water levels can be accommodated easily by a jet boat, the pump is sucking water in though the intake and expelling it though a small outtake, the effect of which is that the boat is propelled forwards, and at a decent speed the boat skims over the top of the water and can operate in less that three inches of water.
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
If you are in a branch of the river where the water is say 30cm deep (1 foot) and you can see another branch ahead that looks about the same depth, it’s entirely possible that the multiple links between the two branches are less than three inches deep, but, sheer speed will glide you over this patch and back into the deeper water ahead.
Herein lies the fun bit… in the above example the navigator can see the branch he’s in and the one he wants to get to and the thin links of shallow water between them, but Nature is not so ordered or polite, and in reality there are bends in the river, islands, some with just river rocks and stones and others with low trees and scrubby shrubs. Visibility can be clear ahead, or not.
A good navigator can “read” the river quite a lot, and navigate accordingly but there will be some places where it’s simply impossible and a quick decision needs to be taken because you are travelling at great speed. Sometimes you guess wrong and what started as a branch of the river that looked deep, suddenly peters out into a dead end.
The driver has kept the speed up in order to get over the shallows, but all of a sudden there is a gravel bank around a corner and it stands between you and the next main body of water… Jet boats are renowned for being able to stop at almost point blank range but believe me, some of these shallows can disappear into nothingness in a nano-second, and in which case, no, the boat doesn’t stop in time and crunch, ends up on dry land, or half in and half out of the water.
Either way the boat stops, and without the speed to keep it planing above the water, it sinks down like a stone.I have first hand experience that jet boats are heavy… and to be honest it’s logical they are are more comfortable being in water and not half on dry land.
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
This is where the shovel comes in… everyone takes a shovel and starts digging around the boat to make a trench so that it can be floated back into deeper water and you can take off again. Sometimes it’s also not clear where the deep water and the rest of the river has actually gone to…and that’s where the strong shoes come in, the passengers will take turns to start looking for the deeper water and figure out how to get to it. Riverbeds are not kind to soft shoes.
It’s not to say that you will have to do the walking and digging parts of th equation because often the rivers are kind and you don’t run out of water… but it’s always a possibility and in a way, if it happens it’s a shock and a giggle, one second you are in a boat skimming over silvery water with the sun dancing off it, next you are half on dry land with a thump and everyone is laughing at the navigator, and grabbing shovels to help out… One thing is guaranteed, no matter how easy or how difficult the trip you will get the boat ride of your life and laugh more in a few hours than you have in years.
Sadly this type of really fun “back block no frills” jet boating is not offered to tourists as a matter of course… they get offered the “safer, deeper water jet-boating experience” in sections of the rivers that are more predicable and reliable.
The tourists get offered rides like this one on the Waiau in these photos.
Is it exciting? Heck Yes!
…Is it half as exciting as the “off-road back blocks High Country version?”
Well, I’m a High Country Gal at heart so would it really take you three guesses to figure out my answer to that one?
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
