The sun is the only spotlight for the circus performers who bound onto a ramshackle raft, docked in Parkersburg, West Virginia just across the river from Belpre, Ohio.
A crowd of more than a hundred spectators watch in awe as a unibrowed trapeze artist flips in flippers, clownish sea captains attempt daring feats and strange puppets dance up and down the gangplank to the tune of fiddle-filled sea shanties.
It鈥檚 the eighth stop on a month and a half long voyage down the Ohio River for the Flotsam River Circus. The ragtag team of rafters are floating downriver at a five-mile-per-hour pace, bringing acrobatics, hula hoops and spinning plates to many Ohio rivertowns.
鈥淚'm not really a boat guy, and I'm not really a circus guy,鈥� Jason Webley said. 鈥淚've always just felt this sort of poetic attachment to rivers.鈥�