Fishriver water levels June 2018

Hi. We are a group of 8 doing the fishriver canyon hike next week! 19-23 June. Can anyone who has hiked it recently advise us on the current water levels please?

This is what the guys from Cape Town Hikes had to say: “We hiked it 10 - 14 May. We had quite a few water crossings to do but I suspect by now most of the crossings could be dry unless they’ve had rain since then. Daytime temperatures was in the low 20s.”

Sounds like a fair amount of water :wink::+1:

Thanks for the info Arno

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Enjoy the hike! Please update us on the water level on your return. We’re there in mid July. Also who has any advice on what shoes to take for the river crossings.
Thanks

Will do Andrew

hallo Annelien and Andrew.
Please could you both up-date us on the river level on your return. We’ll be hiking it end July/ beginning August. Did it 2 years ago dry foot. Not a single water crossing. Enjoy the hike - such an amazing hike to do.

Sure Christan. And based on your last experience i won’t worry about water shoes until we hear from Annelien.

We are back and we survived to tell the tale!! It was an amazing adventure… but doing it once was good enough for us, thank you! The water levels were high enough to have water to filter when we needed, but we didn’t have to do a water crossing once where there wasn’t enough boulders to walk across over, so no water shoes needed.

It was quite cold at night and we had one night of strong wind, so consider those hiking tents! We were grateful for ours :wink:

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Awesome! Thanks for the feedback :smiley::+1:

Thanks a lot for the advice; definitely taking our tents. What did you use as pegs?

The aluminium pegs that came with the tent is too flimsy for the sand, so we made like we do on the beach… take a sandal (or rock when doing the fishriver), tie the tent rope around it and bury it in the sand. When sleeping, our body weight was enough to pin it down though :slight_smile:

We also just returned from our trip hiking the canyon. We only took our tent inner and left the cover. It saved on weight. It was nice to have a tent to block the wind and sand & for us girls it supplies a bit more privacy when we need to change clothes etc. We didnt take the pegs either, we just left our hiking bags in the tent to prevent it from blowing away.
Theres enough water in the canyon for drinking water and swims and we also didnt need to take off our boots for the river crossings. You only need comfortable shoes for around camp. What an amazing experience.

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Thanks for that, we’re getting close to our departure so appreciate the feedback. With the current cold front sweeping the land, I think we’ll even take our fly sheet! My Cape Town mate who did the hike in May had to take his boots of 22 times!! So it’s good to have further confirmation about that, and saved me from buying some water shoes. Regards

thank you for the feedback everyone - have a good hike Andrew. Looking forward to hear from you on your return.

Hi Christan, home after an epic Fish River hike. All dry river crossings, plenty to drink. Tents were well used, 3 very windy nights (and days) and 1 night of rain. We all thoroughly enjoyed the hike. Busy downloading my Garmin route to compare to my Slingsby map, because i can’t reconcile to the map distances! I could go on, but you’ve done it before so enough said. Looking forward to doing it again, but keen to find out more about the Naukluft hike further into Namibia, apparently that is a ‘proper’ adventure. Enjoy your time.

Thank you for the feedback Andrew, really helps.
Sounds like you’ve had a great time. Slightly concerned, we’re planning to do it without tents, as we’ve done before… we’ll see.
I’ve heard great thing about the Naukluft hike. Would also be keen to hike it.
Keep well.