Despite the cooler weather, we both slept fitfully. The rocking and bumping of the boat on the pontoon and the wide variety of new and strange noises, as a result of mooring just downstream of a large barrage, had us imagining all sorts of strange events during the night. I was very happy that I had chained the boat to the pontoon, but nonetheless the subconscious mind has a way of integrating strange noises into some pretty interesting dreams. The one thing I didn’t imagine was when it started raining again during the night. Luckily I remembered that we had left the dogbox windows open, so I was quickly up to close them before the salon filled with rainwater! After that, we gradually fell to sleep as the noises died away. We must have slept soundly after that, as it was 10am before we woke.

As I sat on the rear deck having breakfast, I realised why the noises came and went during the night. When we arrived yesterday, the old lock was not passing much water, with most of it coming over the barrage. This caused the main flow of water to head straight for the 2nd-last green buoy, passing along the edge of the pontoon.

However, this morning I realised that when the majority of water was coming through the old lock (powering a turbine positioned in the lock), the water headed for the 3rd-last green buoy, leaving the pontoon area in a calm eddy. This explained the periods when the boat was rocking at the pontoon (when the water came over the barrage) and when it was quiet (when the water came through the old lock). It also meant that the problems entering and leaving the pontoon would be at different green buoys, depending on which one was in the direct line of the water flow (which you could tell by which green buoy was leaning over the most).

After breakfast we decided to go for a bike ride in the direction of Fumel (further up the Lot, but not reachable by boat). Fumel was not as attractive as we thought it might be, so we continued along the river on a bike path.

Behind the old railway station, we were intercepted by a local who told us that a deer had fallen off a riverside cliff and was lying injured near the bikepath. We continued on and eventually came to the deer, who must have injured a leg in the fall, just before the local arrived in his Peugeot Berlingo van. We continued cycling and about a minute later we heard a single shot. One Fumel family looked like having venison for Sunday dinner! After a while we arrived at the riverside village of  Condat – a very picturesque village of stone buildings, and stone bridges over small streams entering the Lot.

Also saw a classic Renault that I remember from my childhood in Australia.

After a couple of hours of riding, we arrived back at Ste Vite and prepared to cast off. We were facing upstream toward the barrage, so I decided to cast off the bow ropes first, let the bow swing around with the current, then when at 90degrees to the pontoon, we cast off the stern ropes. I then gave it some power to move out into the current and as it started to drift to the left towards the green buoys, I steered right towards the red buoys and gunned it to get out of the cross-current as soon as possible before getting too close to the green buoys this time. From the shore, it probably looked all controlled, but on board I was not quite sure whether we were going too slow (and not getting out of the cross-current) or too fast (in case we hit the rocks again). I guess we had the right balance, because we survived OK. The trip downstream was very pleasant, including a stop at the picturesque Lustrac lock, and just a bit faster than when going upstream.

We did not see another large boat on the river until be had cleared the 16m-deep lock just upstream of Villeneuve-sur-Lot, and found a boat waiting to go upstream. We moored at Villeneuve-sur-Lot for the night.