Washout!

Sometime during Thursday night Argy woke me and we were right in the middle of a tremendous thunderstorm. The lighting was frequent and vivid; it must have been raining hard but that did not register at that moment. I got up at 4 the next morning and looked down the driveway at our road. It was dark and foggy but I thought I could see something, a mound of dirt maybe? I figured that leaves or loose hay had blown into the road in the storm. Wrong.

Apparently during the storm the culvert up toward the end of the road was not able to handle the runoff. The resulting overflow ran down the road toward our driveway and the culvert there could not handle the water either. Before long the water was running down the dirt road and you can guess the rest. What I saw was a gully about two feet deep at the end of the driveway.

Not going anywhere that day! The town road crew was able to get a temporary culvert in place (much too narrow for the boat trailer, but that is another story) I was able to pull the trailer out and am now parked in the road. It sounds like we got almost three inches of rain in about an hour and a half. Quite the storm and the effects will be around for a while.

The river is over its banks and the amount freshwater in the tidal section is amazing. I went as far as the first offshore islands today and the water is stained brown just like in the lakes. Needless to say the striper fishing is really shut off at the moment. Let’s hope for a few days where it at least does not rain so things can get back to normal. In the meantime I’ll be working on freshwater and looking forward to getting our road repaired.