Lough Erne Yacht Club

News > Fermanagh Floods at LEYC

Created: 11/24/2009 2:00:54 PM, Updated: 11/24/2009 2:49:42 PM

Southerly gales in high water levels drive waves flooding the length of LEYC foreshore. The fixed jetty inside the Marina is underwater. Punts on the shore at the east end of the site are in danger.



Fermanagh’s month and more of heavy rain, with hard south winds, began soon after the Rivers Agency lowered the Lower Lough below safe navigation levels in early October. Water levels became high and rising in a couple of weeks. The Agency did not open the sluices until later. The system is now overwhelmed.

Our historic LEYC-EYC buoy, set in concrete ashore at the expense of our late Admiral Horace Fleming about 30 years ago is now breaking the waves again. The dock lines of some boats tied to the fixed jetty inside the Marina, which is all underwater, have become mooring lines, hard pulled by southerly gales on the beam. Fortunately there are no waves, in the shelter of the floating marina, or these boats would be ashore.

At the east end of the site, punts left ashore for the winter in the bushes from jetty to gate are afloat driven in by waves, some right up to the concrete. With winds from the south, they will drive ashore rather than be washed away, but, as has happened often in past winters, the abrasion can rip a punt’s bottom to shreds.

At the west end, the crane stands lonely and tall, its foot in a couple of feet of water, its jetty all under. There is media talk of worst floods since the 1950s. More likely in LEYC history the worst since the last winter of WW2 when RAF Killadeas was badly flooded and, as old photographs show, the mooring yard where the RAF water navigation buoys were kept and the mooring blocks made that our boats lie to today.

The photos here were taken by Diarmuid O’Donovan on 24 November. Follow photos link for more. Michael Clarke, LEYC Historian.