7 knots according to a trawler skipper. The river was running fast and carrying lots of sticks and clumps of weed and rubbish. Every few minutes there’d be a unnerving scraping along the hull as a pile of flotsam bumps along the waterline. What’s it doing to that fresh antifouling paint?
I’m worried that a large log will come floating along and not be able to fit between the hulls. I decide to stay on watch just in case. High tide is about 10 pm, and the riving is peaking about the same time.
Moonlight turns the river to a mercurial flow that reaches out across the cow paddock. By 4am the tide is now low, and the river flow is decreased a little, and the cow paddock has appeared again. The current is not as strong and I’m not so worried about logs doing any damage – so I sleep.
Here’s a photo of the river the next day at slack tide. There’s a small pile of flotsam nearby and the nearby sailing boat was anchored further upstream and got dragged down to here. In this position she can swing on Current Sunshine so I want to get it moved to a better position.
A few days later and the river is now back to normal and I’m working on the fairing for the motor. It will be done in a few days. I took a some more photos on my phone but dropped in the river and so the photos are gone too. I have a new phone with the same number.
Seeing the pictures, that mad weather we had on that river is all coming back to me. No wonder it took me 5 months to get my hulls painted!