It was a sunny but cool morning, which was a great relief after the recent canicule weather. I checked the control panel for the batteries, and observed a confusing result. While the voltage for the house batteries had risen from 21V to 26V this morning, the % of capacity had fallen from 54% to 38% since the battery charger was connected yesterday. I was concerned by this, since the % capacity reading was already low and should really not go any lower, but at least the voltage was high enough to run the fridges. However, since Gaétan said he was coming back today to check things, and get me to sign the order for the Mass Combi unit, I thought I would just wait to get his opinion. So I just continued working on catching up with the re-write of earlier years of this blog.

As the locking process reached its conclusion, I fully realised that this was a manual process, as the eclusier pulled open the lock gates by hand!

As I walked further up the harbour, I thought I'd had a stroke of good fortune when I stumbled upon the H2O Atelier (workshop) from where Gaétan worked. Since he had not yet made an appearance at our barge, I thought I might at least be able to describe what I had seen with the readings. However, when I asked if he was around I was met with a "Gallic shrug" from one of his co-workers, who was not very interested in being useful. So I continued walking up the canal and then back around the main harbour to the barge, where I followed the finish of the World Cup Cricket semi-final between India and NZ. Given that yesterday's game could not be completed due to rain, this one-day match was now extended to two days to give India a chance to bat. And surprisingly fourth-placed NZ (on the basis of all the preliminary matches) beat 1st placed India, and entered the Final. The Indian captain Virat Kohli made a valid comment after the match, asking what the advantage was of coming 1st in the preliminary rounds, when the 4th placed team is treated exactly the same. He suggested that instead of 1st playing 4th, and 2nd playing 3rd, with the winners of these matches going to the final, 1st and 2nd should play in a semi-final with the winner going straight to the Final, and then the loser of that match playing the winner of the 3rd vs 4th game to determine who goes to the Final. That way 1st and 2nd get a second chance, while 3rd and 4th must win to keep progressing. Sounds sensible to me, and is the system used in many other sports. It only requires one more match in the finals, but compared to the weeks/months spent on the preliminary rounds, that's a drop in the bucket.

In the late afternoon, Gaétan had still not appeared at the barge, so I went up to the Capitainerie office to see if they knew how he could be contacted. The guy on duty rang him, but since it was appraching 5pm, he was unwilling to come today, and said that he would be at the barge at 9am next morning. Looks like that's the best I could hope for, so I jumped on my bike and went for a ride up the Canal de Bourgogne. While Rita had said that this canal was very weedy around Dijon, it looked pretty clear here, with several boats wild moored along the sides.

In the early afternoon, I thought I would walk over and check out the harbour at the entrance to the Canal de Bourgogne, which runs up to Dijon and beyond. As I arrived there, a boat was going up to the canel from the river, and I saw that the lock was manually operated (by the eclusier in blue standing on the front lock gates).

I rode for several kilometres up the canal, but it was dead straight with little change in the scenery. When the surface changed from compacted roadway to loose gravel, it became very tiring to ride through, so I turned around and rode home.