Miscalculating the Crossing - Packrafting the Crossing and Davey Rivers in Southwest Tasmania

[@RodLittle]

Great adventure Luke - nice to see you staying safe and making good choices. Showing how beautiful the wilderness of Tas is!

[@LucasChamberlain]

Such inhospitable terrain! But seriously scenic, would've been awesome to be out there.

[@fayleya3865]

I love watching your packrafting adventures. The perfect balanced between prepared and exploratory. Your risk tolerance is exactly the same as mine, so your videos are the sweet spot! Please keep on! Love it!

[@tasmanianhutadventures]

Nice adventure I met a couple who owned the base camp in new Norfolk last week and he had a business picking up locals and tourists hiking etc he said two 70 yr old walked from Huon campground to cockle creek in 15 days I was like wtf what legends.....nice trip mate take care

[@assplundah]

Another awesome trip guys, well done! Great clarity in your videos too, what camera gear do you use?

[@ChasingCheetahs]

Same as the Denison trip. Mostly a GoPro Hero 9.

[@Kenjineering]

Fantastic effort! The treefall across the rapid looked very nasty indeed! If this trip occurred over the last few weeks then it would have coincided with my trip further upstream where I was doing non-packrafty things, amassing my own collection of miscalculations and also not accomplishing what I originally set out to achieve haha. I'm assuming the 5 day wait at Melaleuca was the recent cold front + strong winds weather warning? If so, it wouldn't have been any fun trying to do the SC track under those conditions!! How much did the Davey station volumetric flow rates come down (from 4000 GL/day) after a day and night of no rains? I was surprised at how quickly the Davey and its tributaries became fast flowing after just a couple of days of light rains.

[@ChasingCheetahs]

Yes, this was in the last couple of weeks. We set out from Huon Campground on the 26th of Feb. A more detailed write-up of the trip can be found at www.chasingcheetahs.net/home/2023/3/12/miscalculating-the-crossing The weather front that came through at the end hit us on the last part of the walk to Melaleuca on Monday the 6th of March. There were a couple of groups who arrived at Melaleuca the day before to do the South Coast Track who ended up being turned back by the weather, as Louisa Creek and Louisa River had both risen to levels where they couldn’t safely be crossed. So not only would it have been shitty if we continued on, but we probably wouldn’t have gotten through. The gauge on the Davey had dropped to 1,563 Ml/day at midday on the day we set back out on the river after our lay day. The flow on the Crossing was probably less than this indicates, as the gauge is so far downstream. But I did see during the week we were at Melaleuca it rocketed up to a whopping 23,000 Ml/day during that storm!