Today dawned much cooler and breezy, and around 8am Rita rode her bike with all her luggage up to St Jean de Losne Gare for the train trip to Beziers. I walked up to the Gare a bit later and collected her bike to bring it home.

In mid-morning, Gaétan arrived to check the Mastervolt Mass Combi unit and the batteries. After several calls to the Mastervolt technicians to get a better understanding of what he was seeing with his various measurements, they concluded that the Mass Combi unit had failed, and given it's age (13-14 years) there was no chance of getting parts to do any repairs. So, he recommended that we replace like with like and get essentially the same replacement unit, so that it could just be a plug-and-play replacement with no need to change any of the background wiring and controls. We went up to the Capitainerie office to get a quote, and the nearest current model to our 24/2000-60 configuration was a 24/2600-60 model, for about €2400 (gulp!). Having previously looked online for replacement battery costs at BatteryMegaStore, I thought I would also enquire with H2O about a quotation for 10 100AH deep-cycle batteries, and they said $2900!!  Since the MegaStore price was €920 delivered, I don't thnk I'll be getting batteries from H2O. It also caused me to go back to the boat to check the online price for Mastervolt 24/2600-60 units, but they all seemed to be in the €2200-€2700 range, so the H2O quote for that looked reasonable. So I told them to go ahead with the new Mass Combi order, and we'd think about batteries later. Before he left the boat, Gaétan put a charger onto the batteries which bypassed the Mass Combi unit, to try and get some life back into the batteries so that at least the fridges could be brought back to working order. Within a couple of hours, the battery voltage had been raised from 21V (below the cutoff limit for the fridges) to 23V (above the cutoff) and the fridges could be turned on again.

While the batteries were being charged, I thought I would resolve another problem we were having with the lack of hot water. So I drained the rest of the water tank, then removed the bypass hose and connected the inlet and outlet pipes directly to the calorifier tank. I then partially filled the water tank and tested that all was secure with the piping. There was some leakage due to some other connections that weren't fully tightened, but that was soon resolved. I then filled the tank, and turned on the electric immersion heater in the calorifier tank (hoping this runs on shore power and not from the batteries). After a while I tested the hot water taps and after some coughing and spluttering due to air in the pipes, we had hot water again! I was a bit worried later in the day when I tested the hot water again, and found hot water coming out of BOTH taps. But after a bit of Googling, I found this was a common problem caused by the expanding hot water forcing its way back up the cold water pipes. They said that if you continue running the cold water tap, it will turn back to cold water. So I tried that, and that's exactly what happened! Phew, I thought I was going to have to drain the water tank and start all over again.

In the afternoon, I noticed a large barge with crane entering our part of the harbour, and wondered what it was doing. I soon found out when it started using a grab-bucket on the crane to scoop weed out of the water and dump it into the belly pf the barge. We had been told earlier that H2O had not been allowed to remove the weed until after the fish hatching season finished, but now they can do so.

Later, as I was working away at my computer on this blog, I looked up and saw a large barge headed straight for the side of our barge. Or so I thought. It was just turning to move to another part of the harbour and I just happened to see it as it was pointed directly at me!