We started the day by catching up with the news on the internet, and were surprised to learn that, after the recent run of Parliamentarians admitting to dual-citizenship, Barnaby Joyce, our beloved Deputy Prime Minister, was a New Zealander (ROFL). I can only imagine the stream of jokes that will now follow. It will be interesting to see whether he stands down from Parliament.

In the morning, I tried to make an OzForex (OFX) payment to Lacen for the façade rendering. However, since it was my first payment to him via OzForex, they said they would call me to verify the transaction before I made the payment to him. However, being overseas, I foresaw a problem if they called my Australian number, so I changed my preferred mobile phone number to my French number. However, I still didn’t receive any call. In the past, when this happened, they have emailed me to follow up, and I was then able to explain the situation and verify the transaction details. However, by the end of the day, I had still not heard anything from them. We’ll wait and see.

During the day, several large yachts passed through the port heading east. Two of them moored and stayed the night. Perhaps there is a yacht race coming up somewhere in the Med, and these yachts were taking the shortcut from England.

Since we have not had any good painting days yet (too hot, too wet etc), we decided to do the deck painting after we left port, and so went out to Weldoms to replenish some painting supplies. It cost very little because we had accumulated a number of vouchers over the past weeks which were all redeemable today.

During the afternoon, Rita went down to the Tarn to try using a stand-up board, which she hired from the bike/canoe hire shop. A while later I walked down to see if I could get any photos of her, but she was nowhere to be seen (I later found out she had gone west of Pont Napoleon, which is why I didn’t see her). She reported that it was pretty easy to do, but was a lot of work coming back upstream against the breeze.

As I came back to the barge, I noticed that the hotel barge St Louis was in the double-lock, and didn’t seem to be going anywhere (I later discovered that the double-lock was having one of its regular malfunctions). But this gave me a chance to show just how long the St Louis is, since it has less the 2m clearance at the back and a little over 2m at the front. Since the locks are a standard 39m long, the St Louis must be about 35m long.

Later in the day, Rita went swimming with Valerie and friends at Lac Molieres, which is just a few kilometres north of Nico’s new house at Puycornet. I suspect this might also become their favourite swimming spot.

While Rita was away, I got on with more websiting. As I gazed across the canal during a moment of reflection (waiting for the right words to come), I saw a different kind of reflection as the setting sun cast reflections off the rippling canal water onto the bow of Calandro.