As described in the next post, we’ve had a week in Slovenia paddling mainly the Soča. I paddled the slalom section on the 20th and found the water level a bit higher than when SOC had paddled in June, four years ago. There’s a photo on the SOC website, taken by a German lad the group met up with, from the footbridge at the start of the Slalom Section and I noticed on my own photo from a similar spot that things had changed quite a lot. So I went back a couple of days later and took a load of shots, trying to get close to the same position where Andy had stood to take his photo. Below you’ll see my closest match – the water level had dropped from my run, and is now only a little higher than in the 2012 view, and it was overcast rather than the late afternoon sunshine of the earlier photo.

The boulder on the left at the entry of the rapid at “A” has split. The upstream bit is still shown as “A” on the 2016 shot, but a larger part has fallen downstream to “A'”. The big boulder marked “B” in both photos has been washed down and round a bit. But the huge (5m on a side) boulder at “C” has simply vanished ! Boulders immediately behind it (as seen from the river, left in the photo) seem not to have moved much, but something must have washed out from under it and allowed it to collapse into the river. Where Pete Ball is calmly paddling across flat water in 2012, there is now a large piece of the boulder, at “E”, with quite a few new boulders also visible under the water upstream and river left of it, pushing a lot of water into the narrower right hand channel. This has had the effect of raising the water level in the short reach between boulders “A” and “E” which is one reason why it is quite hard to judge the relative water levels in the two photos. I suspect the boulder “D” in 2016 is the one which was lying between “B” and “C” in 2012, but it is hard to be sure.