Sunday at 5 o'clock

Sunday at 5 o'clock we ventured out to look at the backyard. It has been raining heavily all day and most of yesterday. Some would say this weather sucks, but Michael and I remember rain falling like this in Marysville, routinely, with an average annual rainfall of over 1000ml, most of it in the winter months where it rained every day (like England).

However today was different (for here), today it has rained since about 10pm last night and has barely let up. We went out to do the shopping at 10:00am, returning home at noon, and since then it has rained so constantly that we have just lived in it, around it, through it.

The water table has not had time to adjust to all this rain, as it has been on and off like this for the last 3 weeks. There is no drying out period, no wind, and the last time we saw the sun it was Monday last week. Therefore every shower adds -what it feels like - a million millimetres to the already saturated land.

We were quite excited to get out and see how the water transforms the property, though apparently there are people in WA who have been sitting on their house roofs for 16 hours waiting for help from a helicopter.

The water is around the house and has broken free from the dam and is running every which way into the spillway. It courses across the paddock and makes creeks where there were none. Most noteable is a dam of laying water, which has sprung up in a dip of the paddock. I started to wade into it, but only ventured about 5 m out, the bottom was muddy and I was not sure how deep it would get. One of the picture here is of a spider running up a piece of grass to escape the flood.

The pictures below show just a little of the flood on our land, and the movie at the bottom is the footage of the creek causeway that has cut us off from the world. Even Michael's new car will not tackle its fast running current.

We know that there are a lot of people affected by this way worse than us, but we have never seen anything like this before in our own backyard. We are in awe.