Up early to watch the Hawks/North game up at the house, then stayed on to watch the Cats/Swans game. Hawks didn’t look overly convincing, but showed courage to come from 26 points down early in the 2nd quarter to run out winners by 14 points.

After the games, I went back to the barge to start packing for our week on the Upper Lot. In mid-afternoon we drove to Cahors via the back roads through Lauzerte. Took a bit longer than we thought (GoogleMaps said 1h2m), mainly because we got just a little bit lost along the way. Cahors is an interesting town, with a long and varied history. It is set within a horseshoe bend of the River Lot (much like Bern on the River Aare), with the old part of town on the right of this aerial picture, and our starting port near the bridge at the centre left of the picture.

Finally got to Port St Mary around 4.30pm, and moved our gear onto the “rubber-ducky”.

After having a look around the boat, we realised that the next week would be a good example of how the “other half” lives, since it didn’t quite have the mod-cons that we have grown used to on Kanumbra. For example, there were no electricity outlets on board, so charging of phones, iPads and laptops would be a problem. They gave us a transformer, which would convert the 12v DC power from the batteries into 230V AC, but it was only powerful enough to charge the phones, and not the iPads or laptops. There was no shore power connection, but there was a very short connection cable. So we took our laptops out to the dock at Port St Mary and charged directly from the power box before we left. The cartoon drawn by Peter at dinner last night suddenly assumed more truth than we anticipated.

Rita had a bit of a migraine, before seeing the boat, so rather than setting off immediately, we asked if we could stay the night in the port and head off in the morning. Since they were sending many boats out that afternoon, I think they were happy to handle our introductions to the boat and our departure on the next day.