A few days ago Andrew slept up top keeping an eye on Imagine’s position as the tides were starting to turn, the wind had picked up and with 50m of chain still out and the direction of the wind, there was a possibility we could have gone into the riverbank.
During the night a couple of times he manually winched up a few metres (no mean task as it only pulls through a couple of links per pull! ) to keep us from going too close to the bank. There is so much silt and the contours/depths of the river have changed.
Pete (on Jambalaya) was not so lucky. Andrew looked out the window early hours of the morning and found Pete had gone in a bit close to the bank. It was nearing low tide and his boat had grounded and was on a lean. Nothing you can do except wait for the tide to come back in and then try moving out further and reset the anchor. We phoned the MSQ guy that had given us his number and asked if he could arrange for a “no wash” zone so that the boat wasn’t being banged up against the rocks. He did and most of the boats going past were fairly good. Sue went out and shouted at the Go Boats drivers that were going flat chat past not caring about the wake they were creating.
A couple of hours later the tide had come in far enough to refloat Jambalaya so Andrew took the dinghy and helped Pete pull the boat forward and reanchor. It could so easily have been us.
They have been doing a hydrographic survey of the river post flooding. Sometimes they came fairly close!