In the middle of the night (around 0130h) another thunderstorm rolled through Castelnaudary, but one advantage of this storm was that by the morning the wind had stopped.

The port at Castelnaudary has an interesting population, with the usual families of ducks and ducklets, at least one coypu that regularly patrols the port and one white swan that brings a touch of grace and beauty to the port. I’m not sure which is more graceful; the white swan in the foreground or the green tjalk in the background.

In the early afternoon, we walked down to the station for Rita to take her train trip to Montauban, where she would meet up with Valerie and others in the band for them to go to their practice session near Gaillac. This turned out to be in a tiny village called Touriac, which was having its annual night market. Hence quite a crowd and the practice session turned into a roving band which visited the various tables.

As I walked back from the station, I noticed a “chicken & egg” situation; which came first, the garage door or the tree?

In the late afternoon, I noticed that Somewhere (the training barge of Steve Bridges) arrived in port, after a 2-day training program on the canal with some prospective bargees. The new skipper did a good job turning out of the port and under the narrow bridge into the Bassin.

As I walked back to Kanumbra, I noticed that the port coypu was doing circles at the back of a hire boat (hoping for food?) and gaining lots of attention from the kids on the boat. Later that evening as I was walking around the port boundary, I noticed movement near one of the boats on the far side and on closer inspection saw that it was the coypu sitting on the water’s edge. He was quite timid and allowed me to approach for a photo, but ducked back into the water when some noisy kids came on the scene.

During the afternoon, preparations had been made for the Night Market to be held this evening, and as darkness fell the market kicked into life with a mixture of bric-a-brac market stalls and food & drink stalls. Things started slowly, but eventually all the tables and chairs were filled with families out for an evening meal. Kanumbra has a ringside seat for all the action.

Rita had left instructions to check out if they had a band at the Night Market and, sure enough, they did have one, which started playing jazz directly outside the wheelhouse door of Kanumbra, which made it very easy to get a picture of them.