Woke early (5.45am) to watch the Hawks-Port game. Hawks eventually pulled away to be 45-point winners. Got a call from Stuart saying that they had pulled into Serignan and would stay the night there with some friends, and catch up with us in the morning. Rita was happy because that then enabled her to go to Lac Damazan to go swimming. She will go shopping on the way home and then we will decide if we want to go to the circus at Damazan tonight.

In the meantime, I stayed at the boat in the shade and started putting on some of the protective yellow hosing along the top of the gunwales, where we typically board the barge.

Also, since I now had a rope that had been cut in half, I looked up “splicing” on the internet and tried making an eye in the end of the rope that was cut yesterday. A bit more complex (and physically difficult) to get the ends of the strands in and out of the rope, but will keep trying to make the final product neater.

After Rita returned from swimming, we had a light dinner, then cycled up to Buzet for dessert and coffee at Le Vignerons restaurant (which has a very nice dining room with a terrace deck out the back), then down to the Baise Locks for the 14th July dinner and fireworks at 11pm. To illustrate the artistic quality of the night, the “DJ” singled out Rita and me for the quality of our waltzing to the old French tunes he was playing!! After the fireworks, we waited 30 minutes for the safety crew to clear the towpath of fireworks litter, then we cycled home to Au Canal after midnight (at least with lights for both of us this time, unlike the return trip from Damazan last year).