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Stormy Night – the morning after

Well last night was a real stormer!!!! We had planned to attend the Keswick Convention evening celebration and then a Stuart Townend concert taking place right afterwards. This we did and it was a great evening – the convention events take place in a very large tent with capacity to seat about 4,000 people. It was full for both of the evenings events and the overflow tent too!

However, it had been a very wet day and the evening was no exception – in fact if anything the rain was getting heavier! It’s always difficult to judge when you are in a tent, and the convention tent is made of a plastic impregnated canvas material which makes the rain sound even heavier. But it is true to say that it seemed to range from heavy to very heavy to torrential all evening long….. We hoped that our tent would still be dry when we got back!! It was although we could feel the water under our groundsheet!!!!!

The night raged on with a combination of rain and wind – which was very gusty at times. Gave you the feeling that your tent would collapse around you!!! But it did not! The following morning we were aware of some commotion around the campsite so decided to get up and have look outside! I took the following photo of our tent and as you can see there is a lot of water around the front of it and some big puddles to the rear – right!


It was very squelchy underfoot! The weather had calmed down for a bit and the wind had completely died away 😉

The following tent was not as lucky as we were! As you can see the puddle beside it actually comes right inside!!! That puddle is actually joined to the Derwent Water! The lake level had risen and and the commotion we heard was people being evacuated from their locations – lock, stock and barrel as they say!!!! The folks who would own this tent were in the process of taking it down before the water level got too high! – this was one of the sites we were offered the day we arrived – thankfully for us we choose to look for a better site!


Here is another view of the site and you can see that the lake level as engulfed the two smaller tents. There were no people around! I can only assume that they got out before the water came!
The next view shows the lake! The tree in the centre view was about 20 meters from the lake shore line the day before! There would also have been a road from the position where I took the photo down to the lake edge – which is now completely submerged!


So we counted ourselves very fortunate that our part of the site was relatively unaffected by all of this drama! I would say about 50 tents and caravans had to either move to another part of the site or leave it all together!

Happy days when camping 😉