This was the sunrise on
Thursday morning – what a difference to the constant rain on Wednesday.
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When Karen left for work
at 6, we hadn’t noticed that the water had nearly risen to the level of the
pathway but by 7 o’clock the water started creeping onto the pathway – that’s
about 12-15” higher than yesterday.
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Water just starting to
flow onto the pathway
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By 9 o’clock the path was
under about 6” of water and the river was still rising. I logged onto the River Avon website to check
their live webcams and most were just going into red which means you must be on
a flood safe mooring.
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Pathway getting submerged
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You can see from the
picture above that we were on flood safe moorings as the mooring ring slides up
the pole as the water level rises.
It was soon obvious I wasn’t
going to have my planned cruise for the day and that we would have to stay
put. Buddy and I went for a walk instead
but first we went to check on the nearest lock.
The weir was quite a
torrent compared with yesterday and the lock landings were completely submerged
so it wouldn’t have been possible to moor up to operate the lock without
getting extremely wet.
I found the water level
marker board and saw that it was now 6” into the red. It has 12” of amber below the red and then
green below the amber. Green is when it’s
safe to travel.
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Board at red at the lock
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Buddy didn’t care as he
had found a large stick to play with and it was just as well no one was around
otherwise he would have taken their legs off with it.
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Buddy and his branch
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I know the river levels
weren’t that high, compared with how they do get in times of real floods, but
it still meant boats had to stay put.
Well, a plastic boat that was moored opposite us went for a little
cruise during the day but only a couple of hundred yards and then back again.
There were three
narrowboats, including us, on our moorings and one of them was a hire boat from
the canal at Stratford. In the afternoon, I noticed a guy I know, called
Steve, standing on the bank next to the hire boat. He's the guy at the
Stratford boatyard who is always good to me and lets me have a free pump out if
I do it myself. I wandered over to see him and he said that the hirers
had now gone home and that he was looking at getting the boat back to the
base. Being as the base is on the canal he hadn't realised that the river
was up and so he was going to have to get a lift back down on Friday to take
the boat back.
Steve explained that
there had been an accident and somehow the guy steering the boat was rushed to
hospital as his thumb was ripped out. No one knows how it happened but apparently,
the rudder hit something and swung the tiller arm uncontrollably. At least that also
explained why the hire boat was facing the wrong way (you should always moor
facing upstream on a river); they must have been in quite a panic.
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The three boats on the
moorings
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Coincidentally, I knew the
middle boat: when I was up at Northwich
for three weeks, waiting for our boat to be completed, I obviously took Buddy for
his normal walks. On his morning walks I always took him along the same part of
the canal and we passed a boat moored at the bottom of a garden every day. It was the same boat as the one moored in the
middle!
No doubt levels will be
back to normal on Friday and we can continue our travels on the pretty River
Avon.
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