News From Bob

Bob is sending us news of the Lady:

Today I ran up the engines on Lady Mary. They started well with the pre heat I also checked to make sure that there was water coming out of the exhausts. All is well.

I checked through the boat for signs of water ingress, but all that is Ok as well. We have had a huge amount of rain recently. The weather has been cold and wet and lots of wind off the Pyrenees. One day we had a little ice on the deck but it soon went and although bitterly cold no more of that yet. Seems that February is going to be the hardest month for cold.

The mouse droppings took half an hour to clear, and possibly I haven’t got them all yet, but there will more I suppose. I found out where there is one nest in the bunk base in the rear, but I must have disturbed them as the nest was empty, but plenty of sign that it was recently inhabited. Now this might not be good news as it means that the micelets are big enough to leg it when they hear noises.

Obviously it would be wrong of me to have the responsibility of looking after your boat and ignore the problem. So I have borrowed a cat from a lady nearby and put that on board.

I was a stranger to the cat and visa versa, so I had to ask the old lady to come and get the cat out of the boat.

Due to my lack of French, she had thought the cat was mine anyway and was returning it to me, so she had no success with the cat either.

Obviously we couldn’t leave the cat on board indefinitely in case, having eaten all the mice, she then also died of hunger. But we couldn’t get the cat out. By this time there was also cat shit everywhere.

A friend along the wall has a small Tibetan terrier called Harry, he is a bit bigger than the cat and afraid of nothing.!

Clive said harry would do it, so we put Harry in as well and left the door open, and stood back.

There was a lot of noise but nothing emerged. A movement caught ,my eye and I noticed that one of the curtains had come off the window in the stern cabin. Suddenly there was movement across the doorway as two shapes in nhot pursuit were seen travelling from aft to bow inside the boat It was so quick that none us could see who was in front Harry or the cat. One of the forward curtains showed how a cat can climb. It is doubtful if that curtain is repairable.

Finally the cat emerged through the door at 100 mph and was last seen going in the direction of Toulouse. Harry strolled out with a big grin on his face only stopping to cock his leg against the inside of the door. Not had as much fun as that in ages, was the sort of expression on his face.

I will go back in in a few weeks time to see if there are any more mouse droppings, if there aren’t then the cat idea was a good one. If there are then we might have to buy some traps. They had a model on sale in the Monday market I noticed. It is a variation of the traditional type, but when you bait the trap, the mouse has to put its head through a hole to get at the cheese/chocolate, whatever, and it would disturb the mechanism such that a small blade is released and cuts the mouse’s head off, just like a Guolotine (is that spelt right?) Obviously it is a French idea. I believe these are more humane as it seems wrong that the older model which just broke the back didn’t necessarily result in instant rigour mortis

So just leave it all to me. I have control.

The community here is now complete. The majority of live aboards are English, but we also have Belgian, Swiss, French and I think German.. One of the Belgians is keen to have a getogether so that we can all meet and greet. He has suggested this to Odile and she has asked her boss. He came back with what a good idea we will pay for the food and drink and they can have it in the Capitanerie and I will come as well. This was a better result than we anticipated but it has s till to happen. Some of the community are away in England attending to dead Mothers etc and another because she is missing the kids! No doubt when we recover them someone else will have pissed off.

Today we awoke to glorious sunshine and we think we have this for a few days. We are now into the Winter Contract period, and have started using our allocation of 30 showers which have to last until the end of March. The water and electricity is now working over the other side and the boats there are supping at the well of water and electricity. This didn’t go smoothly and we are s till trying to understand how it all works. There is an allocation of 2000kw of electricity in the contract, this also has to last until end of March. However as we aren’t sure of daily usage we cannot work out if that is enough. Also it is allocated on a daily/weekly/monthly amount. I must be on daily, because on the first day of the new contract which was a Friday I ran out of electricity, Odile was off until Monday, so being enterprising I nicked yours for the weekend. Sod the mice!! let them get cold!

I am still fighting for a better signal from the WIFI. It now turns out that there is no signal coming from the pillars on the wall. There never ever was going to be. How that story got about no one knows. Even though the guy from Marseilles who came down with an assistant, and they are the experts (!!!) walked up and down proving that the boxes did have a live signal by measuring it on his laptop. As he progressed along the wall he recorded the readings. I still complained and he said the problem was mine as I live in a Farraday cage. So the following day I purchased a plastic kitchen tupperwar box with lid and bolted the lid of this container to the outside of the plexiglass window. I drilled a hole through the lid and the window and let the wire for the ariel through into the boat. Putting the rest of the container onto the captive lid I had a waterproof outside ariel straight into my computer. Brilliant piece of work around. The signal was no better. So another expert was sent for, this time the man from Castelnaudary who arranged the buying and placement of the boxes on the wall. He it was who said there is no signal from the boxes, who dreamt that idea up?? The experts from Marseilles were talking a crock of shit! They were measuring the signal from the transmitter on the wall of the Capitainerie.

Odile now says there is another transmitter in the office, paid for and never erected, but that has been paid for as well. She is going to ask her boss if that can now be put up at this end of the marina..

We understand that new Mayor of Carcassone has overturned the decision to drain the port and canal this year. The old Mayor is now in clink re examing his political future as a result of too much corruption. The new incumbent is a red hot socialist who is also defined as an anti English politician. Not sure what that will mean to us if anything we have our own Mayor. However the VNF were determined to drain something other than the next bottle of wine and so they have pulled the plug on a stretch both above and below us. In this part of the world we are the only ones sitting in water.

Life is good we have lots to laught at, and do. My communication with home seems to be getting less as I slip further and further off the front page. The price to pay.

Please tell me the news from the Colonies, do we have a picture of the new frock?

Lots of love and affection to you all.

p.s. There are no mice