We stayed moored off the point overnight, and got a good sleep. The morning dawned cloudy, and we were hoping for a break in the weather to get away from the incessant heat. Even for us Australians, it is getting a bit much, so I can only imagine how the French (and Europeans generally) are handling this heatwave. As we ate breakfast, we saw the sailor who passed us upstream yesterday out again for an early morning sail. With the freshening breeze today, he had the spinnaker up and was making good speed.

We ambled back to Moissac mid-morning and moored at the Tarn Quai, where we saw that more dredging and tree clearing was taking place at the mouth of the double-lock into the Tarn. Hopefully, this will clear away a lot of the the debris that has been floating there in the past week.

Alas, the cloudy morning was a false dawn, and as the day went on, it became hotter and very humid, so we escaped from the barge to the house, in the expectation of cooler temperatures. However, while the ground floor was quite comfortable, the top floor (where the working kitchen is located) was very warm with the sun shining through the four skylights. We had hoped that the VMC system would moderate the temperature, but the current heatwave is simply overwhelming its capacity. It is very good at retaining heat during winter as it expels air from the house and then transfers it to the incoming air, but it can’t really do the reverse in summer when the temperatures are so extreme.

So we transferred all the computers to the ground floor dining room and were able to work in reasonable comfort. We then had dinner on the terrasse, where we could catch a passing breeze, and then returned to the dining room to do some websiting and finishing off the pan conference paper. That night we slept in the nearly-finished house for the first time.