13th July 2019 – Evesham Workman Gardens to Evesham Lock
We had a very good night’s sleep and in the morning we were woken by the gentle smell of dog excrement. Wendy was extremely calm about this and screamed at me to get up and find out what on earth the dog had been up to. It turned out that the dog had been up to quite a lot of crapping on our rug in the front of the boat, however it was all solid and easy to clear up.
We took a look outside and noticed that the path with the rings in where we were hooked up to was now underneath a couple of inches of water. This meant that the River was rising and was in the early stages of breaking its banks. We managed to carry the dog on to the bank of the gardens themselves which are about a foot and a half higher then the platform we were more to so that she could do her business. we strolled along the gardens until we came to our neighbour in front of us who was decidedly worried about the situation and felt that it would be better to get onto some proper flood moorings rather than the rings we were currently using. At this point the dog decided to demonstrate that she wasn’t very well by creating her very own impression of a cow pat made from a poo coloured blancmange. This was immediately outside our neighbours boat and they smell coming from it was rather pungent. Naturally I did my best to clear the mess up and failed miserably.
We return the dog to the boat and we kept an eye on the river which was clearly rising by about an inch every hour. a little while later our neighbour came along and said he was going to look backup the river because there was some proper flood moorings with high poles and he was going to try and squeeze in there and that we were welcome to moor alongside him should he be successful. We were moored on a slight bend in the river which meant that the back of my boat was hanging out into the river which made me a little more comfortable as it was unlikely the entire boat would end up on this ledge with the rings in and then when the river flows away the boat could then be tipped over. But I was becoming increasingly more worried about the situation, especially as we were being told the river was going to continue to rise for sometime.
Just after 12 a very nice bloke called Rob came along and was talking to us about the situation and he suggested that we take a look at the lock and see if there are any space available on the other side of the lock which would put us above the Weir which was flowing into the part of the river we where on. I made my way from the boat onto the garden bank and followed him to the lock where we met with the lock keeper who suggested that we move the boat even though the river was now regarded as red meaning we shouldn’t sail on it, but they would prepare the lock for us and there was a space we could more up to. So naturally I jumped at the chance and we sailed up the river without any incident through the lock and moored on the other side where the river level was much lower and the path was 5 inches above the top of the water.
So that was all good then. Well not quite. During the time it took us to get through the lock and into the new mooring the dog decided to completely explode all over the boat. In fact she managed to cover the boat more thoroughly than you could have done if you you stood there with a fire hose for 20 minutes. And of course dog poo really has a pungent honk! So with eyes watering and plenty of gagging going on Wendy managed to clean up the worst of it. At this point we were beginning to feel a little sorry for ourselves. what we really wanted to do was go to the Royal Oak and have one of those burgers and a pint or two, but there’s no way we could have got in there with the dog smelling like she did! In the end we popped along to the pet shop and got some tablets to help calm her stomach down. When we got back to the boat we decided to put the dogs bed and the towel I’d been using to wipe her back-end down with into the washing machine to give them a good wash, which they desperately needed. At that point the inverter decided to stop working and we had no 240 volts. Bye bye washing machine.
Needless to say I was getting a little miffed at this point. but we decided that we were where we were and things happen and you just have to make the best of it so we settled down had something to eat and decided we take another look at things the next day.
Artful Dodger 