Ever cycled through a flooded river?

I mean proper flooded roads where the water is sloshing over the top of your wheels.

I was doing this on my ride home tonight into Manchester. I was riding down a couple of stretches of road that run alongside a river and the flooding in the road was almost up to your waist. I wasnt bothered about the wet or the cold of it as I was pretty much soaked anyway. But the exerience of peddling through long stretches of river water, with a wave effect from moving cars, with the water sloshing over the top of my wheels and my peddles crank and chain completely submerged, was a whole new cycling experience. Great Fun!

Hippy will be along with a picture soon.

And yes, I have.

Yep. I never got any shots from the Autumn Epic though.. that one was almost getting over the top of and into my bottles..
and there was this one time, outside Calais..

Nice photo. It almost captures my scene although I was navigating around abandoned cars and there wasnt so much green :)

It felt good to be on my langster peddling through the water that had crippled the engines of motor cars and not having to abandon my trusty steed :)

More like this you mean?

and it was also just a little bit windy that day..

I got past it, the cars didn't.

Yes, the big York floods of 2000. The army had a tracked vehicle thing and there was little old me on my old mountain bike. Had to do some greasing after that.

No photos but here's a pic of a fire engine going through it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattneighbour/2327291494/

Haha that more like it :) I especially like the image of the guy sawing his way through a fallen tree. He's not leaving anything to chance when he ventures out.

Once it gets deep, it gets difficult. I went through the contents of the Jubilee River* after it burst its bank at about 2 feet maximum depth, and it was hard to keep above a slow walking pace. Of course, it would have been hard to walk through at a slow crawling pace, once more demonstrating that biking>walking

*Contemporaneous with this bank failure, but not directly related to it afaik.

Me and McCarthy cycled up a flooded embankment and it was up past our waists. We were with a friend aswell who later on the week discovered an uncomfortable pinkness around his privates!

Mick also had a little fun hitting super soft muck at the side of the submerged pavement and trying to unclip whilst up too his nuts in water haha :D

The river that flooded wasnt exactly... hygenic.

Awesome fun though, dont think we got pics however :(

Japs pinkeye?

Agree with you there mdcc. It has to be a slowly softly approach when taking on busted rivers.

The hard road beneath you allows some traction though in the deep water. It wasnt only faster than walking but faster than driving :)

Pir0...I took a long shower after cycling through it, knew it wasnt clean, could smell the effluent coming up from the drains. Dread to think what was lurking beneath.

Near Twickenham during the Winter Equinox about 8 years ago I cycled down the side of the Thames and figured the flooding couldn't be that bad and continued. It eventually submerged my feet, then BB, and finally my knees would slosh under on every pedal stroke.

I couldn't turn because of the narrow path and not knowing where the edge of the river was, I couldn't stop because I wouldn't start again. Thankfully I was on a hybrid at the time and just put it into granny gear and just carried on.

When I came out after a few hundred meters the bike was soaked as was I. It was freezing, and there was debris all over my legs and the bike. I needed to strip the whole thing down and eventually had to replace pretty much all of the bearings on the thing (BB, headset, wheels). It was extremely damaging to submerge the bike in water for so long and not to have serviced it instantly afterwards.

Good fun though :) I was grinning.

I thought for a moment that this thread was a clever pitch for donations to the Pakistan flood relief.

In the news its wondered why people are so hesitant to help.

Sorry, I've come over all serious again, haven't I?

I'll neg rep myself.

Yeah but Ashe, are they cycling through it?

DK, really sunk in my estimations.

Uh-oh... have I just done another Tsunami mixtape blunder? If so I apologise. My coping mechanism with most things is to laugh. It doesn't mean I don't care, usually it means I do care.

"tsunami mixtape"

OMG!!!!!

BD - Blowing in the wind?

It was worse than that. Less than a week after the tsunami I started a thread on a music forum to put together the right soundtrack for it...

• Blondie - The Tide is High
  
• Pixies - Wave of Mutilation
  
  

You get the idea.

Pretty much burned all rep that 8 years of running the website had built up in one stroke. To this day I still find it funny and as I have just proven would easily do it again. It's how I cope with stuff, tragedy, authority, life... I laugh at it. If people don't get this, then it tends to go down about as well as a kitten in a sack thrown into a river.

Presumably a swollen river?

Poor kitty.

Yup, cycling home from work in the winter about 2 years ago and I happen across a puddle. It looks quite big, but hey, how deep can it be? We soon found out it was about two and a half feet deep. I was with Lucas, his chain came off in the mddle of it so he had to wade through.
The water was bloody freezing. Made sure I had a good shower when I got in!

Stain Remover!! AIDS!!

How I laughed.......... brilliant.

Or not.