The Rising River

Well hello Winter! Crikey, what a day of wild weather here on Banks Peninsula!

So we haven't had the predicted show to 200m (it stopped at around 700m) but we've had buckets of rain and the wind howling outside right now (11:00pm) is almost as loud as the roaring river. It sounds like we have two jet planes warming up their engines out there right now. Batten down the hatches indeed...

Today's blip (taken from inside) features the rising Kaituna river and the small (well, usually it's small) feeder stream that comes down from below the summit of Mt Herbert t meet the Kaituna just by the house here. To give you an idea of how dynamic our catchment is, our usual winter water flow on the valley flat (where there is a council measuring station) is usually between 1 and 2 cumecs (cubic metres per second). Today at 4am it was 5 cumecs, by 4pm it was 25 cumecs. And this all happens within a valley that is just 12kms long. It's an amazing place to watch the power of nature.

Tomorrow's forecast is more of the same. Will we get snow? Who knows. Will we get heavy rain? I think its a given. I'd love to head down to Birdlings Flat to watch the sea - they're predicting swells of 5m above usual levels, but these will be boosted by the perigean tides over the next few days. Now that could be interesting....