"EGG BEATER" WEATHER SYSTEM FLOODS NORTHERN NEW ZEALAND
April 5 , 2007
by Michel & Jane DeRidder

A Big Fat High (BFH), as our official weather ambassador Bob McDavitt called it, blocked and stalled the passage of an extremely heavy deluge, creating a weather bomb, bringing with it unprecedented, unexpected, unrelenting rain — eighteen inches inside of thirty-six hours, three months' worth pelting down over much of the northernmost tip of New Zealand, concentrating its heaviest fall over the Bay of Islands. Newspaper headlines and radio newscasts trumpeted such news as:

CHAOS IN THE RAIN
Roads Closed by Slips
Trapped Motorists Spend the night in the Opua Cruising Club
Residents Flee to Rooftops
Buildings Washed Away
Cliffhanger Houses
Stock Drowned

Flooded Keri Keri bridge.

And of course rivers and streams rampaged. When the rain started we were back in the Kerikeri River to repair our shore boat, badly in need of it after forty years of almost constant use. We had only just re-launched it and were delighted to find we had made it watertight again. Weather broadcasts warned of heavy rain to come, mentioning 46-knot gusts, from which we were well sheltered. We welcomed the rain, but long after our tanks were brimming over the rain kept pouring down, a veritable monsoon. Debris sped by us, larger and larger as hours passed until it was whole trees, islands of vegetation, and finally breakaway boats that bounced off docks, pilings and moored vessels on their way downstream, damaging shore structures as well as themselves. We kept bailing our dinghy. As soon as the water level rose enough to accommodate our draft, we cast off our lines and rode the current out, starting the engine only enough to change course in order to keep within the channel. The water was thick with mud, vegetation, junk of all sorts and we dared not risk burning out our exhaust or cooking our engine. We anchored out of wind and current alongside the estuary channel in ten feet of water to clean the nearly plugged engine intake filter, rest, watch the excitement - and keep bailing the dinghy. As the tide rose, stranded vessels in the shallows were being towed off. All but one, and that one came off a day or so later with the help of the ever-present, always helpful Johnny-on-the-spot, John Wood of Kerikeri and his son Ken.

River deposit.

Back into the river we went at high tide and morning calm to sort ourselves out, grateful to know that our pilings still stood. Our jetty, protected behind a rocky point and in the counter current, was just fine. Cardiac Track was well washed but OK, and our van did not need bailing. Our 150lb ferrocement mushroom mooring anchor, that holds our bow inshore out of the channel, had dragged a considerable distance. Michel cleared it of what seemed a half a ton of vegetation and dragged it back to more or less where it had come from. At low tide for two days running we wrestled with a sunken tree caught on our stern piling, finally pulling it free with a line to our starboard sheet winch, towing it into the shallows with the dinghy. We suspect it is weighted down with a steel piling.

More boats washed ashore.

We were one of the lucky ones, as we discovered when we went upstream by dinghy the following day to see what had gone on. We found several yachts high and dry. A 34-foot clinker launch had been dragged down by the bow and sunk on the spot on the owner's 76^th birthday. Friends a short distance away watched it go down. We found river markers toppled, missing or askew, the Stone Store Bridge closed while repairs were being made, and huge mats of debris - logs, branches and vegetation - already providing a home for ducks. The yachts that were tied between pilings behind the sheltering peninsula that helps form the Stone Store Basin were the ones that had suffered the worst damage, as the full force of the torrent swept over the sheltering peninsula, catching them broadside. Their lines broke or their pilings pulled out and they were swept up high onto the river bank not far away, one of them about two metres above Spring Highs. The only one left from that group of moored vessels was a Dutch cruising yacht by the name of My Lady. Kowie, the owner, was on board alone, her husband mate on a container ship en route from Viet Nam to the US "earning Freedom Chips", she told us. The Coast Guard, answering her distress call, tried to get her to leave the vessel, but she refused, saying she only wanted help to do the right thing to save the boat.

Two days after the flood, a mooring tender that had come to work on floats and docks paused, as pre-arranged, to try and pull off 53-foot British yacht Auralynn stranded just upstream from us where she'd been deposited at the height of the flood. She'd bounced off a dock en route, holing the wooden hull, so that when the tide receded she got firmly planted in the mud, and when it rose she filled with water. A neighbour from one of the nearby houses screwed a ply patch over the hole, and the owner pumped her dry. John Wood heeled her over using a halyard from the masthead to a cleat on his yacht Grandma. The mooring tender pulled Auralynn round to turn her, and dragged her bow-first through the glutinous mud. The following day, a friend checking up on St. Elmo for absentee owners arranged to nab the mooring tender on its way out of the river in order to get them to drag her off also from where she had been lodged. They put her on a vacant set of pilings just aft of ours. Those were the two boats in the most precarious and seemingly most hopeless situations. All we could do was take photographs and cheer.

Refloating Auralynn. (SetSail note: The DeRidders' camera is acting up, so these photos are not as high quality as usual. But they figured it's better than no photos at all, and we agree!)

This flood, which was by far the worst to affect Northland, took out major roads with massive slips (Kiwi for mudslides), destroyed countless properties, changed the courses of rivers. It was not a flash flood. It was a massive weather bomb over a huge area that could not move, so the rain would not stop. The flash flood of '81 that brought nineteen inches of rain in just seven hours came down on land so parched it could not soak in, arriving in one rushing wall of water, bringing with it cars, trucks, sheep, vegetables, depositing boats high on the curves of the rivers. Both were costly destroyers of property, the first sudden and quickly over in the middle of the night, the latest a long, drawn out torrential night time and daytime horror. Both were far worse on land than on the water. We consider ourselves extremely favoured. We were certainly never without water, or power, or telephone, or email. We were home with all our familiar comforts. When it got wild and dangerous, we were able to leave, to get out of harm's way. Those on land were trapped in their houses without amenities, or in their cars, where many spent a terrifying night. The stories of loss and shock and horror on land continue to emerge.