We walked down to the gate and crossed the meadow to the car park beside the jetty. Groups of people leaned against their cars, watching a family recover a motorboat from the river. A father and his teenage daughter manoeuvred a two-wheel trailer down a stone ramp. When they had submerged the trailer in the shallow water the father released the speedboat from its mooring by the bank and steered the craft onto the metal cradle. Above them, on the ramp, his wife sat at the controls of their car, waiting to tow the trailer from the water. A younger daughter sat behind her, eating an ice cream and engrossed in a comic.

The current pulled at the speedboat, trying to draw it into the centre of the stream. The father struggled with the metal cradle as his wife raced her engine, watching him through the rearview mirror. When he signalled, she engaged bottom gear and edged up the ramp in a blare of noise and exhaust. The tow rope tightened and the trailer moved forward, its tyres emerging from the water. But the speedboat had floated away, and the man shouted to his wife, who switched off her engine. Oblivious of all this, the girl in the rear seat read her comic, now and then remembering to lick her ice cream.

A youth in swimming trunks strode down the ramp and helped the man pull the speedboat onto the trailer. The wife reversed a few feet, releasing the tension in the rope. As Cleo and I boarded our cruiser they were fastening the craft to its cradle. The wife restarted her engine, released her hand brake before engaging gear, and fumbled with the controls when the car rolled backwards down the slope. Everyone began to shout in warning, and the car park attendant left his ticket booth and remonstrated with the hapless driver.

“What’s going on?” Cleo asked, as I waited to cast off. “Are they driving into the river?”

“It’s starting to look like it…”

The car’s rear wheels had disappeared below the water. Flustered by the attendant and the shouts of the onlookers, the woman had lost control of the car. The girl in the rear seat cried out and lifted her feet from the water covering the floor. Her mother opened the driver’s door, allowing her impatient husband to take the controls. But as she stepped into the shallow water there was a shout from the young man in the swimming trunks.

Buoyant now in the deeper current, the speedboat had floated into the stream, dragging the trailer with it and pulling the car down the ramp. People were leaving their parked vehicles, cups of tea forgotten in their hands. Two men waded into the river and gripped the door pillars of the car, trying to hold it against the current.

“Cleo, wait here!”