A sunny but cooler morning, so it was time to get outside and clean all the windows with a vinegar and water solution spray.

After that I sat inside and thought about the Taggerty MicroGrid Project, for which we failed to receive government grant funding, so we will have to think of another way to structure it and fund it.

The Tjalk that arrived yesterday left this morning, but in the afternoon another barge, Avanti, arrived.

Soon after they moored, I noticed activity on deck but initially couldn’t work out what was happening.

However, it soon became obvious that they were building a tubular metal frame over the boat...

… which they then started covering with a canvas cover.

The cover was in two parts, which were zipped together in the middle.

Soon the entire barge was covered.

But the covers had been cleverly designed to have a doorway for access to the wheelhouse, and flaps that allowed the mooring ropes to be attached to the pontoon. They also had a strap around the bottom edge that could be tightened with a ratchet to securely stop the covers from lifting in the wind. A very clever idea for winter covering, which has some design features we will adopt in the future for Kanumbra.

Sometimes the difference between a good photo and a bad photo is only a matter of fractions of a second. Here is a photo of two kingfishers, just milliseconds after they flew off the concrete wall alongside our barge!

In the evening, I cycled down to the Gare to pick up Rita from her train from Dijon. As we rode back in the light of the full moon along the river, I noticed a vision near the rowing club that I had to stop for and turn around and go back to capture, as the full moon aligned perfectly with the canoes I had photographed yesterday. Some photos are just a matter of timing and luck.