Day 5 and the water started receeding yesterday. They are still letting water out of the dam. They are timing it with low tide to minimise the effect.
This morning Andrew made it ashore in the dinghy and a friend from an apartment onshore had gone shopping for bread, milk and baked beans for us. So we are not going to starve.
There is a ban on non rescue/recovery traffic on the Brisbane river currently so Andrew took advantage of this and went up the mast to replace a couple of halyards. Couldn’t spend too long outside today as temperature has been in the early 30’s.
We have not been totally without incident. Yesterday a large piece of submerged debris hit us and caught on our anchor chain. This caused us to move back and forth in the water. We tried motoring forward to take some pressure off the chain, then winched the chain higher to see if we could dislodge whatever it was. The strain on the winch with us moving back and forth was too much for the gearbox. We no longer have an operating winch. We just had to let the object hang around. As the tide went out the current increased, but there was nothing we could do.
Luckily overnight whatever it was had stayed long enough and appears to have detached itself from our chain. The chain still has small debris tangled up around it.
We have just ordered a new winch and anchor. We wont be able to pick it up for about a week. Hopefully when the river gets back to normal we will be able to raise the chain and anchor. If we can’t and have to cut it free at least we will have a good anchor to immediatly reanchor on.
Its not over yet. The weather bureau has forecast 4 more days of rain starting tomorrow hopefully not as bad as the last lot !
Our thoughts are with those in NSW that are now copping it. Some of the towns there have also had some terrible flooding.