We were up early, and while checking the inverter in the engine room, I noticed a lot of diesel in the engine room bilge. Since we had just yesterday re-filled, I wondered if there might have been an overflow. But I couldn’t see anything obvious, so in conjunction with the inverter problem, I decided it was again time for "Phil the Fixer”. Luckily Phil is an early riser, so he was soon up at the barge. He found that the "Error 6” was due to another loose connection on the house batteries (which was quickly fixed), and that the diesel leak was probably coming from the new fuel filter which Iain had fitted a couple of days ago. Phil tightened the filter, which seemed to stop the leakage, and we decided to empty the bilge when we went into drydock next week.

After all this last-minute panic, we were away at 0930h, with Ruth accompanying us to Toulouse since she wasn’t due to return to Australia till the end of the month. It was rather sad to see the lock doors close on Moissac as we prepared to go through the first lock and start our journey North.

We covered the multitude of locks between Moissac and Castelsarrasin with no hassle and, given the hot weather, we were soon stopping for lunch in the shade under the bridge near St Porquier.

As we passed through the lock at Escatalens, we were reminded of the adventure we had last year finding the nearby house of Audrey’s parents, so we posted the photo below on Facebook, just saying hello.

We thought everything was going too smoothly, and were soon brought back to reality when we encountered a "broken lock" at the first of the five locks before Montech. VNF no longer has eclusiers accompanying boats through these locks, so we had to call for help on the newly installed control box. Someone arrived within five minutes and soon had us on our way by over-riding the controls. He then semi-followed us through to make sure all was now working OK, so we again rewarded him with the customary bottle of beer as we left the last lock.

We arrived at Montech at 1720h. As we were arranging rooms for the night, we heard a call from Ruth of “snake” from her bedroom. We thought she must have started drinking a bit early for the evening, but on investigation, it proved that she indeed had a juvenile "dark green snake" in her bedroom. She and Rita flushed it out and trapped it under a plastic tub, under which they slid the card we got at last night’s Sunbeam farewell. We then took it outside and released it into the grass at the side of the towpath, after getting a photo of it to prove that we were not imagining everything. It was only small, but we were still left wondering how the hell it got onto the barge!

That evening, we had a farewell dinner with Don and Laura Bestor at the Montech Port restaurant - very nice food.