Earlier this year my husband and I took my teenage brother and two of his friends up to North Kohala on the Big Island to "Flume the Ditch". I had seen some advertisements for this activity and thought it looked like a lot of fun. Basically it is kayaking a drainage ditch down a mountain ... slowly.

It took us about 2 hours to drive there from our home in Puna. The place was easy to find and we went in the small office to pay and get ready. You are outfitted with a wet-jacket (to keep you dry) and a life jacket (in case you fall in). Then you get a historical and safety briefing by a guide. The guide tells you all about how this is 22.5 miles long and was built to bring irrigation water from the wet mountain down to the dry sugar plantations using nothing but manual labor and dynamite in only 18 months in 1906. Now that the plantations are gone, the nurseries and other agricultural enterprises still use some of the water for plants and animals.

We then got into two large vans pulling trailers with the kayaks on them and headed up to the launch site through gated cow pastures. The kayaks sat 5 to a person and were pretty easy to get into with a little help from the guides. The ditch was about 5 feet wide and 3 feet deep and the water was cold! We were set to navigate a particularly scenic portion of the ditch ... I can't remember how far we went ... but it took a little over one hour. It was very pretty - we passed all sorts of plants and trees and went over a few flumes (that's a ditch-bridge over a small gulch) and through a few tunnels. In the flumes we would stop and look at the plants and the gulch and the small waterfalls and ponds under us. In the tunnels we would have to lay back a little so we didn't whack our heads on the tunnel. The front person and the back person steered and paddled and the rest of us just enjoyed ourselves.

It was a fun and interesting trip but I was a little disappointed because I expected to go fast at least once ... but the entire trip was pretty leisurely - no white water to be found :(. When it was over we got out of the kayaks and back in the vans - they had been driven to the ending point and were driven back to our cars where we got coffee, juice and snacks. All in all the entire thing took about three hours and was worth the price of admission. Web page here - http://www.flumindaditch.com/ - and phone number is (808)8896922. As of 2002 the visitor rate is $85.00.