Rita and I were up early to take the 0746h train from Toulouse to Montauban to pick up the Receipt. Before that I had contacted barging friends David and Evelyn who had recently got their Cartes to see if they knew anything about the requirement to have a Long-Stay Visa first, and they said they had never heard of it. They also said they both got Receipts automatically and sent me a scan of one of theirs; so now we knew what we were expecting to receive in Montauban. When we got there, we took our ticket and waited for 5 minutes till our number came up, and we were directed to the counter with our favourite officer. We didn’t really have to say anything; she looked at us, leant over and grabbed the Receipt from her desk and gave it to us. All completed in 20-30 seconds. Why couldn’t she have done this on Monday? Despite trying not to have bad thoughts about her, all I can suspect is that it was a purely vindictive power play.

Before we left the Prefecture, we sat down to examine the Receipt in more detail and saw that it was the same format as Evelyn’s and that it was valid until November 20, the day of my flight out of Paris. So, no matter what now happens with the Carte, I can stay in France until then. I should have felt some emotion about receiving the Receipt, but in truth I felt nothing, not even relief. I guess it will sink in later. In the meantime, we will contact the supervisor at Montauban again, to seek more information (and some documented evidence) about the need for a LSV before getting a CdS. If there is some proof, then others should be warned because it is not at all evident from the main online sources. If there is no evidence for the requirement, then we will seek to have them stop spreading this false information so that others who apply in the future will not be scared/inconvenienced by such rumour mongering. We headed back to Toulouse on the 1051h train, so only half a day was wasted.

When we got back to Toulouse, I went for a walk down the canal to go inspect the drydock entrance, which I had not really taken notice of on previous trips. The view from the entrance showed a large algae-filled basin and the covered drydock.

The entrance from the canal was relatively narrow with a retractable bridge over it, and a tight turn from the canal - slow and steady is the recipe, I suspect. Walking around to the street entrance on the other side showed a layout of the drydock. I figured we'd be in one of the open drydocks on the right or left of the basin.

As I walked back to Port Sauveur, the urban nature of the port is quite evident, with Kanumbra in the centre, in front of Pomme de Mer.

Around 1400h, Serge called saying that we could enter the drydock basin early, since Hodi was on her way down from Moissac and would be drydocking with us. She was expected to arrive in a couple of hours time. So we kept an eye out for Hodi and when we saw her appear at the northern end of the port, we cast off and let her catch up with us. However, it turned out to not be Hodi, so we tied up around the corner and waited again. We ended up waiting for Hodi till 1700h, when she finally appeared in port, so we again cast off and headed in convoy to the drydock entrance, since they only wanted to open the entry once for both of us.

We both entered the drydock basin uneventfully, and slowly, and tied up in the basin on either side of the open double-drydock next to the covered drydock (we would be entering the drydock itself early tomorrow morning).

After we were all tied up, the hired help on Hodi took me to task for pulling out on front of him in the canal, saying how unprofessional it was. It was clear from the look on Serge’s face that he had heard this sort of performance before from him, so I didn’t bother explaining that Serge had told us to lead them into the drydock. I just went back to Kanumbra and let him rage at the sky (Serge later apologised for his behaviour).

So now we were stuck in the drydock basin under a full moon, till sometime in the morning tomorrow after all the drydocking has taken place.

We slept on the barge that night, but not after some champers to celebrate the end of Ruth’s barging experience (and the obtaining of the Carte de Séjour receipt), which led to some shenanigans after Rita “accidentally” knocked a glass of water into Ruth’s lap, which led to a 3-way water fight.