Those of you who’ve followed me for a while will know I have a habit of noticing things, asking questions and then becoming completely incapable of leaving them alone.

The river has been one of those things for years. The Eagre especially. I’ve watched it, photographed it, filmed it, talked about it, bored people senseless with it and, occasionally, stood beside the Great Ouse grinning like an idiot as this beautiful little wave comes marching past the shed.

But something has changed this year. I’ve stopped just watching it.

I’m measuring it.

And the more I measure, the more questions I have.

I’ve always said the sweet spot for our best Eagres seems to be somewhere between 12 and 72 hours after a new or full moon, coupled with a decent spring tide. Throw an equinox into the mix and my ears prick up even more. None of that is particularly revolutionary; we know the relationship between the Sun, Moon and tides.

But I’ve noticed something else over the years that I haven’t been able to shake.

Moonrise.

When the Moon is already well up before the Eagre arrives, they seem less impressive. When moonrise starts getting close to the arrival of the wave, things seem to get more interesting. If the wave comes first and the Moon follows an hour or so later, I start getting excited.

And if the Eagre happens to be passing at about 17:25…

Well.

Don’t ask. 😂

I’m not presenting any of that as scientific fact. Quite the opposite. It’s an observation from someone who has spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at the same stretch of water, and now I’ve got enough data to start asking whether what I think I’m seeing is actually there.

That’s the exciting bit.

We’ve been recording arrival times throughout the summer, comparing them with King’s Lynn, watching the Moon, noting the wind and weather and going back through the CCTV when I’ve missed one. We’re starting to understand how quickly the wave moves too, because we’ve now measured the distance between two observation points rather than guessing it.

Yesterday it appeared downstream at about 17:20 and reached my usual camera at 17:31:35. The measured distance is 1.14 miles.

So now we’re not just saying “there goes the wave.”

We’re beginning to measure the thing.

I’ve also been playing with the CCTV footage. Yesterday I took clips through an entire tidal cycle and compressed hours into seconds. You watch this huge Norfolk river empty in front of you, the mud appear, the water retreat and everything become strangely still. Then the Eagre arrives, the film drops back into real time and you can watch the tide physically take the river back.

Then we’re off again, racing towards high water and dusk.

I absolutely love it.

Not because I’ve discovered anything. I haven’t.

I love it because I don’t know where this is going yet.

That’s becoming increasingly rare in a world where everybody seems to have an answer before they’ve even finished asking the question.

Next I’ll put a five-metre survey staff in view of the camera. That gives us a fixed reference for water level. We’ll measure the river properly, build up a cross-section, look at velocity and start working out how much water is actually moving past the shed during each cycle.

And then, inevitably, my renewable-energy brain kicks in.

There’s energy going past me.

How much?

Could we capture a tiny bit of it?

Could a simple floating device generate enough to charge a battery? Could we power something useful? Could we build a little demonstration that lets kids actually see the relationship between the Moon, the tide, moving water and electricity?

Could we take the old work done here years ago, combine it with what we’re recording now, and learn something new?

I genuinely don’t know.

And that’s why I want to do it.

There are some clever people starting to wander into my world at the moment. Scientists, engineers, environmental people, energy people, filmmakers and storytellers. Joining The Conduit has widened that circle again, and perhaps that’s why this feels like the right time to stop treating my slightly bonkers fascination with the river as simply something I do from the shed.

Because there might be something rather lovely here.

Not necessarily a giant engineering project. I’m not trying to dam The Wash or announce that Wiggenhall is about to become Britain’s newest power station.

Something smaller. More human.

A river. A wave. A camera. Some measuring equipment. Old research rediscovered. New data being collected. A bit of citizen science, a bit of engineering, a bit of history and, hopefully, a little bit of magic.

And perhaps a story worth telling.

That’s really why I’m writing this.

If you’re reading it and your world touches tides, hydrology, astronomy, renewable energy, environmental science, filmmaking, education or simply understanding how our natural world works, come and have a look.

Bring your knowledge. Bring your instruments. Bring a camera. Bring an idea.

I’ll provide the river and the tea.

After nearly twenty years in solar, I’m still fascinated by the same simple thought that got me into all of this in the first place: we live in an extraordinary natural energy system.

Sunlight lands on our roofs. Wind moves across our landscape. The Moon and Sun pull at our oceans, and twice a day an enormous body of water quietly changes direction outside my shed.

No fuel arrives on a tanker. Nobody digs it out of the ground. Nobody owns the Moon.

It just happens.

Yesterday evening I stood there watching that little wave come up the river again, knowing roughly when it would arrive, camera running, measurements beginning to make sense, the Moon involved somewhere above all of it.

And at 59, after nearly two decades of doing this renewable-energy stuff, I realised something rather wonderful.

I’m still learning.

Still curious.

Still getting ridiculously excited when nature does something clever.

And I really hope I never lose that.

So, who fancies coming to Norfolk and helping me find out what this river is trying to tell us?