Wednesday 28th July 2010 Montbouy. Day off.

Grey clouds, sunny spells, getting hotter again. The tjalk and the cruiser went up the lock at nine, cruiser first, DB second. We went shopping in Montargis. First, as we were now on our own in the middle of the quay, we moved the boat to the uphill end where the electric box didn’t work. Parked near the canal in Montargis and Mike walked down Rue Dorée (main shopping street) and went to get the new toy he’d ordered from the jewellery shop. Then we found the Carrefour Market on the N7 island in La Chalette. (Why couldn’t we find it before? It was marked in the wrong place on Carrefour’s map!) A small supermarket, but it had all the basics. Annoyingly they had no current leaflets with price reductions and promos. Back home for lunch. Packed all the stuff away and made sandwiches. The new weather station was very neat but needs 24 hours to get the latest updates which are supposed to come with the time signals. A Thames cruiser called Heclantis arrived and moored behind us. Two Dutch Barges arrived, both heading uphill. Detje Anna (new replica) arrived first and moored behind us and the cruiser on the quay. The second one, Rosa, an old one, arrived and the first one moved out to let the second get on the inside next to the quay. They made a right performance of it, even with bow thrusters it took them over half an hour. Another British cruiser arrived heading uphill and wanted to stop on the quay but it was full. Mike told him there was another mooring uphill of the town bridge so he carried on. Five minutes later he came back, making quite a wash past the mooring and went on the quay behind the barges. Later Mike noted he had connected up to the electricity, but neither DB had. After dinner Mike went out to have a look at the mooring beyond the bridge, no one on it and it had an electricity post with three-phase sockets, and on the way back he spoke to the couple on Heclantis. They invited him on their back deck for a beer and a chat. The skipper, Chris, used to be a Thames lock-keeper and now he and his wife Heather live just a bit further up the Loing valley from Rogny. He agreed with Mike that they’d never seen Dutchmen make such a mess of mooring up. They kept their generators running ‘til gone nine although they’d told Chris that they would turn it off when they’d finished cooking.