Today our intention was to move from our mooring at au Canal up to Damazan, where the night market was being held tonight. Checking the rain radar showed that rain was on the way, so we made an early start. When the rain did arrive at Buzet, it was hard to imagine that this section of the canal was empty just a few weeks ago, due to the breach near Berry.

Given my success with the time-lapse yesterday, I got bolder today and tried to film the entire trip from au Canal to Damazan. In doing so, I learnt an important design feature of the time-lapse option in the iPhone camera. When Stuart had filmed the Garonne trip he had to set an interval time on the GoPro - I think he chose 2 seconds. As a result, he ended up with a huge number of HD images from which he then had to use software to create the time-lapse film. With the iPhone yesterday, I didn’t choose an interval and the time-lapse film was created automatically. It was also a relatively small size. How it would go with a trip of almost 3 hours, I didn’t know. So I was very surprised when the film was only 31 seconds long and 73MB in size. But a bit of Googling gave me the answer and showed a clever approach from Apple. The time-lapse interval is set automatically as a function of the length of the filming period. When it starts filming, it uses a small interval. However, once the filming goes beyond a certain time, the interval is doubled by deleting every second frame recorded so far and then using the doubled interval from then on. Once another threshold is reached, the process is repeated, throwing out half the recorded frames and doubling the interval from then on. This continues until the maximum recording period is reached (about 30 hours). This ensures that the time-lapse film is never longer than about 31 seconds. When the film is created it is played back at 30 frames per second. However, I could also use third-party software to slow down the film so that the end result is a little less “Benny Hill”.

When we got to Damazan, the port was full, so we moored just beyond on the right bank (as shown in the film). However, after having just secured all the lines, a barge on the left bank (in exactly the place we were hoping for) cast off and left for Buzet. So we quickly untied and headed over to that spot.

We had been in touch with Hilda May by email along the way, and they were in Villaton but heading for Damazan, along with Anna, carrying Mark and Anne and their two big dogs. Anna was the first to arrive, and Mark showed how a big (35m) barge could be handled by u-turning to moor.

Hilda May arrived soon after and chose to moor “in the bushes” (since there were no clear sites left), although we had offered that they could double outside us.

That night about 12 barge people attended the Damazan Night Market, which has become a bit of a tradition with barge people in these parts. A great night was had by all, with lots of talking, laughing, eating, drinking and dancing.

Some of the first people we met at the market were the Mairie Staff who helped us so much in organising the steelband concert in 2014. They all asked when the band was coming back to France again!

Later in the evening we met an Australian couple who were now living in Aiguillon. They were proud to tell us that last year they had seen a fantastic Australian steelband play at the market. We were almost too embarrassed to admit that it was us, but we fessed up!

As often happens in small French towns, there is a sight which captures your attention and you can’t quite explain why. In the middle of the evening, an old lady appeared on her balcony above the Market Square and stayed there for about 15 minutes surveying the crowd below. After it seemed that she was happy that everyone was enjoying themselves enough, she waved, turned, went inside and closed her shutters, seemingly happy that all was well in Damazan.