With the shingle exiting the Rakaia river mouth into the Pacific Ocean and a biased tidal action moving that shingle north, two lakes are increasingly closed to the sea by the kaitorete Spit growing wider.
The Northernmost Lake Forsyth, that was in the times of earliest settlement by europeans a navigable waterway with shallow draught vessels reaching almost to Little River, now well and truly land locked by the shifting, ever advancing remnants of the decaying Southern Alps.
Time and Tide wait for no man, something dear old Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales author) managed to figure out in the 14th century and I am unaware of any natural opening for the southern and much larger Lake Ellesmere.
Now it is well established that eels can migrate across land when dews facilitate such for the water borne fish, That is how Land locked dams and ponds soon become home for eels. A part of the eel lifestyle includes a trip to the sea and when the mood takes the eels of Ellesmere they simply head across the shingle to the sea. This year however the dry defeated their trip and many thousands of eels perished at Taumatua, estimates of over a tonne perhaps dying when dry conditions did not allow the trip to be completed.
Of course it is just one more signal of the ultimate doom being addressed by a taxation scheme and the talking heads of Canterbury environmentalists are seeking solutions to something I am absolutely bloody certain is not a first for eels bent upon their lemming like migration.
The answer? Well there must be one but I am equally certain no one has ever interviewed a single eel about how the 2025 migration ended in a pile of rotting fish on the shingle of the “Spit”.
Since December this year the Rakaia River that regularly is subjected to flood flows from alpine rains has, in the months of summer, been denied a single fresh surge until very recently and that has clearly been entirely ignored by the Powers That Be amongst “eeldom” with the resulting tragedy unfolding for the Plebeian eels.
Nothing to see here for the elites, so involved in their hand ringing over the departed eels. I would be amazed to the ultimate if it has not happened previously, merely never recorded, so strange eh?
No Minister 
In the UK the Cinque Ports on the SE coast were a bastion against invasion.
Some of these ports are now so far inland they are not a port and other ports along the coast have been washed away. Happens all the time over centuries.
When I was youngster our shearers used to catch dozens of eels in the upper reaches of the Porangahau River at Mangaorapa. They would give a few for my mother to cook for breakfasts and the rest were hung on nearby fences to dry and they took them with them when they left.
A missed opportunity for local Maori at Ellesmere maybe.