Part 3: Water, Water Everywhere ...

I returned from my late afternoon inspection of the river level with some good news and some bad news for my crew.

The bad news was that the river level hadn't dropped at all and was still 6 inches into the red danger zone, so we would be spending the night on our island.

The good news was that we'd been invited out for the evening. Rod and the crew of Enigma had invited all over for drinks on their boat. We all smiled at the irony. There we were, stranded on an island, being invited out for the evening, whereas had we not been stranded and reached Stratford on Avon as originally planned, there would have been no invitation out. So it's really true, every cloud does have a silver lining. We had a great evening on board Enigma and made friends with 3 great people.

We were all convinced, as only a few drops of rain had fallen that day, that the river level would have dropped out of the danger zone by the next morning.

And so, I was up very early the next morning, checking the river level at 6.00 a.m. so that we could make an early start and catch up the lost time from the day before. I was not prepared for what I saw ...


It was a good job I had clipped myself on to the lock gate with my safety line, otherwise I might have fallen in with the shock as I peered over at the flood marker. The river had risen by an extra foot and was not far below the 2 foot mark.

Even in the area where we were moored, out of the main flow, we could see that the ring our ropes were tied to, had risen up the mooring pole indicating a higher water level.

To me though, the most dramatic evidence of the overnight rise of the river, was the appearance (or lack of it) of the landing stage, just before the lock. We had temporarily tied up at this landing stage 24 hours earlier, in order to get off the boat to open the lock. This is what I saw when I looked at where it had been ...


The landing stage was completely underwater, even though we had had to step up to it, as we got off the boat the day before. At the back of the picture you can just see the top of the mooring posts, which 24 hours earlier had seemed quite tall!

There was nothing for it but to settle down to more waiting and another day of enforced leisure.

Lots of love Eddie & crew xxx