Dear all,

You should have got a very out of date mail from me which I hoped to send before the end of June but have only just managed to do so. Communications proved harder to set up than anticipated -- several calls to get the network working for my mobile and then waiting around till I could find a working internet cafe. I tried in Concarneau, Bordeaux and Toulouse with little success (and each a week apart) and had to wait till I arrived in Carcassonne before I came across something which worked properly. So much for the French adapting to the internet! The France Telecom terminals in Toulouse were clearly designed to keep people on minitel. Tho I managed to read my email (on the 4th and first working terminal I found) it would be impossible to send one using an on-screen keyboard which was a nightmare.

So here's what's happened, briefly. I had a great week sailing with Robert Fellowes. We sailed past the Belle Isle and the Loire estuary. The winds helped us all the way and the last sail into the Gironde was magnificent with the boat behaving beautifully in >20 knot winds which was a great relief as last time I'd been in those conditions it was almost unmanageable.

The mast came down at a little marina on the estuary called Pauillac and we motored up to Bordeaux where Donna eventually found us (on the wrong side of the river) using mobile communications and Robert left to go back to England. We then got out of tidal waters and into the canal where we slowly picked up the art of negotiating canals. The weather the first week wasn't great but it picked up and has been fabulous for the past 5 days. We got over the top and down to Carcassonne, which if you don't know has the most amazing old citadelle in the world. Donna left yesterday to go to Crete and I discovered last week that the person who should have joined about now has been stopped from any activity by her doctor. A few frantic phone calls has located another friend who will arrive on Saturday evening for around 4 days which should see me through the canal and there are some promising signs for crew after that but nothing definite.

Times haven't been without incident. We got caught by the tides in Pauillac and had a nasty scrape which I am just about to repair, and shortly into the canals all the bilges filled up and I discovered a hole in the silencer (which also carries cooling water) which has mainly been bound up with not too effective parcel tape since then, meaning plenty of pumping each day. I'm hoping to pick up a replacement today from the post office. So we had a few anxious times when we didn't expect the boat to carry on, but it has, despite scraping the bottom in various places along the canal and getting thoroughly stuck a few times when we were impatient enough to want to get to the bank at night! But we found some superb restaurants including a beautiful chateau just 5 minutes from our mooring and at the other extreme a Les Routiers cafe complete with lines of truckers and quality without style.

Now I finally have an internet connection (more expensive than expected, inevitably) I hope to provide a somewhat fuller account of what's happening. So hope you are all well.

love
Chris