Our day started with a trip to the H2O workshop office to see Florence. It was good to meet her in person, as previously we had only conversed by email, as the H2O invoices piled up over the past few months for all the repair work. She took us through all the invoices, and while we could have quibbled with some of the charges, we figured that life would be easiest if we just paid up for 2 years of overdue maintenance. Florence checked on the whereabouts of our generator diesel pump, but it was still somewhere betweem Paris and St Jean de Losne!

We aso enquired about the cost of getting the diesel tank filled at H2O, and she explained the cost of the fuel (1.59euro/litre) and noted that there would be extra costs for getting the fuel to the boat (which would have to be moved to the workshop on the canal) plus the time invloved in doing the refueling. So on the way home we swung by the community-run refueling station on the Saone, and saw that it was only 1.44euro/litre, and no extra costs. It was also available 24/7 with a credit card. So, in the end it was a no-brainer, and we decided to get fuel from the community-run pumps on our way out tomorrow.

After we got back to the boat, I headed over to the local Bricomarche in search of a few items. Not much luck with most items but I did manage to find some rare short, fatter screws (25mm, #5 guage) that I needed to re-attach the bimini to the wheelhouse roof. I also dropped into the nearby Intermarche supermarket and picked up some liquid supplies for our upcoming cruising (6 still water, 6 sparkling water, 12 Beer, 6 Milk and 4 orange juice). All this came to less than 25euro.

Our next major task for the day was to unwrap the boat from its winter protection. This is always a tedious task that requires some care, given that all the walkways around the boat are initially covered by bungie cord attachments. But a couple of hours later it was all completed with the plastic tarp folded on the deck, and the fly-tent reinstalled over the dogbox. We then positioning the bike rack in anticipation of the bikes returning to their rightful position at the front of the boat, after all the tyres had been inflated.

While I was doing the work on the deck, I heard a familar sound and, on looking around, I saw that one of the islands within the St Jean de Losne harbour is home to a family of goats. While our goat back home passed away last year, it was still a friendly reminder of Taggerty. We were also visited by a family of swans, who looked familiar from our time here in 2019 (or maybe all swans just look the same!)

Late in the afternoon, I got a response to my email of earlier in the day from Serge Ribes, who cleaned and painted the hull of Kanumbra in the Toulouse drydock in September 2018. I had enquired with him as to whether he could explain why the hull paintwork was in such poor condition within 3 years, as noted by H2O where they took Kanumbra out of the water for some recent repair work on the prop shaft. Serge had no immediate answer but suggested that "maybe there was a compatibility malfunction between my paint and the old one". He also suggested it could be due to "some electrolysis attack", which could be the case since H2O had concluded that the new anodes fitted by Serge in 2018 had shown no signs of corrosion, indicating that they were providing no electrolysis protection. I suspect this will just be the start of a conversation, given that the hull will need to be repainted at the end of the 2021 season to provide ongoing protection.

Finally, to round off the working day, we got an email from Florence saying that the generator diesel pump had arrived, and that a mechanic would be around at the boat at 0800h next morning to fit it, before we headed out for some cruising to check out the barge. Actually over the past several years we had learned how to do without a generator, because it always seemed to be non-functioning for one reason or another. But it will be nice to have a working generator (just in case).