Compared to a winter in Wellington, we haven't had much rain in Launceston. However other parts of Tassie have, and all this water turned up in Cataract Gorge last week.
Cataract Gorge is one of the first places (outside the centre of Lonnie) that we visited during our first week here, and we often walk up there to the Basin at the top - its a nice walk even on a dull day, and a great way to clear the head when someones been studying all day!!
We've heard many stories about and seen photos of historic floods in Cataract Gorge, and of course we see the flood banks every time we walk along by the river, but we hadn't seen a flood. So when one of the guys I make coffee for said the flood was going to reach the gorge, we were up there as soon as we could.
The Gorge, and the Basin are normally very slow moving quiet pieces of water.
We went up on Thursday, and were impressed with the noise and amount of water...but there was more to come. On Saturday (14/08) we walked up again, this time you could see the river level was high before we were even near the Gorge. Helped a bit by High Tide, the water was less than a foot away from the boardwalk we walk along. And the river was covered in foam - it looked like ice!!
As soon as we got to the bridge at the bottom of the gorge we could hear the river, it was roaring down the few rapids at the top of the gorge and flowing very swiftly down the gorge.
The path round the bottom of the Basin was totally covered in water...we'd normally walk over that, but definitely not today!!!! (water was a bit muddy for swimming!)
And then we got up to the Basin and saw how much bigger it had become!!! The swimming pool had disappeared, and the playground which is right up at the base of the cafe there, was now a water park. The whole Basin now looked just like it was a wider part of the river, flowing as swiftly as the rest of the river. Right up at the edge of the water (near the play ground) was a whole line of foam, kids were playing in it just as if it was snow!
The river flowing into the basin was a lot more rapid than normal too.
It was dusk as we got there - a great time for wildlife to come out. We got to see lots of Pademelons (like Wallabies but smaller - though you can't see it in the photo, just its eyes!) and Kookaburras - which we hadn't seen this close before.
The peacocks were all roosting in a tree.
