At 5am I was taking Eddie out for a pee, and had this sinking feeling when I noticed the rowing boat wasn’t there. It’s so annoying – even when you put out a stern anchor, which I had, the boat can swing with the wind and get trapped under the jetty. I’ve tried a heavier anchor, but the trade-off in terms of the effort required to throw it out beyond the boat every night isn’t really worth it.
Nothing I could do about it there and then since the tide was half in, so I went back to bed. By about 8.30 the tide was far enough gone for the boat to appear as a pale glimmer, per the first photograph. As you can see from the second, the oars and duckboards are missing, which involves a trek – something of a long shot – around the foreshore in the hope that they haven’t actually left the island.. If they have, we have to blow up the rubber canoe in order to get out to the With, and then start combing neighbouring islands.
Amazingly, not only were the oars and duckboards just a couple of hundred yards along the shore, they had been dumped in a tidy pile by the current. Lucky break!
