The normally serene Hawkesbury River north-west of Sydney is now a vast, muddy inland sea that is drowning businesses, farmland and roads beneath its tides.
The flood is the largest since 1978, making it the fourth-biggest in living memory.
From Rod Hodgskin's tinny, the water stretches as far as the eye can see, inundating roads, farmland, and his family's go-kart business.
The track at Wilberforce has flooded for almost a week and the longer the water sticks around, the larger the damage bill is expected to be.
The same goes for the entire region.
"Everyone's keeping a stiff upper lip," Mr Hodgskin said.
He has lived in the area for his whole life and while the water has quickly subsided from previous floods, it's different this time.
On the weekend, Mr Hodgskin thought the worst had passed and began to clean up, only to watch the water rise again to an even higher level than before.
"It's heartbreaking," he said.
The only way to access the property is via boat.
In the vessel's wake, vegetables from a nearby market garden float by.
Third flood in three years
Residents of the less populous northern side of the river are cut off from Sydney, their jobs, and some medical services.
The State Emergency Service is helping to ferry food and fuel to isolated pockets downstream as well as getting people in need of medical assistance across the river.
The drive between Richmond and North Richmond, which usually takes 10 minutes, now involves a 150-kilometre, two-hour detour through the Blue Mountains.
This is the third flood in three years and it has begun to test the resilience of those who live and work on the floodplains.
Turf farmer Charlie Saliba has been on the banks of the River at Cornwallis, on the Richmond Lowlands, all his life.
He has seen plenty of floods — some even bigger than this one.
But this event, coming less than a year after the last major inundation, is particularly painful.
"Everybody just put 12 months of work in and it's all gone down the drain," Mr Saliba said.
He expected hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of dollars of turf would be drowned by the silt left behind by the river.
"We're going to try again because it's in our blood — but for how long?" Mr Saliba said.
"We don't know."
Rhiannon Phillips manages a market garden at North Richmond where an array of zucchinis, radishes, salad leaves, or whatever is in season, usually thrive.
"This will be devastating," she said.
The entire crop has been lost, meaning income from an entire season has been washed out to sea.
"We've got to start from the ground up and start again," Ms Phillips said.
Her's is just one of several vegetable farms that feed the people of Sydney that has gone under.
Ultimately, Ms Phillips said, consumers will have to pay more for produce given the vast extent of floods on agricultural land across the country's east coast.
'Huge impact' when the water drops
It's not just farmers who are anxiously watching the water.
Western Sydney University ecology and environmental science lecturer Michelle Ryan, from Pitt Town, is anxiously waiting to see what's left when the water subsides.
"It's going to have a huge impact on the environment," she said.
"A lot of erosion, a lot of sedimentation — so all of our top soil, all of our garden soil, is going to end up in our creeks and rivers."
This flood began last week and peaked well below the March 2021 level.
But now it's peaking again, higher than both last week and last year.
"We have a long history of flooding in the Hawkesbury and of major floods," Ms Ryan said.
She said there was nowhere left for the water to go and blamed residential and commercial developments for worsening the situation.
"Where water would normally infiltrate, go through the soil and recharge the groundwater, we're putting in a lot of hard surfaces … roadways, shopping centres, housing," Ms Ryan said.
"All that is creating a huge amount of runoff and all of that is going into the creeks of the Hawkesbury-Nepean."
