Tuesday 17th May 2011 Antoing.

Grey morning, sunny with lots of clouds in the afternoon. Did a few jobs in the morning, Mike replaced the wire on the 12V socket connections for running the laptop in the car. After lunch we chatted with Andy and Sue off cruiser Musia, they said they were heading for Strépy-Thieu next day. We went out in the car to have a look at Pommereoul. The resident péniche had gone and the two English DBs that had been at Antoing the day before were moored there. The crew of Harmony were off with bikes on the back of their car as we set up the laptop in the car. The phone worked OK on SFR so I rang our surveyor but got his answering service, so I left a message to say we would be on dock on the 30th and asked if he could do our survey on the 31st. Our Bouygues Internet worked OK too on 3G, so I looked at emails and sent one to Helen to give what info I could on the locks on the Zuid-Willemsvaart that she’d asked Mike for on Sunday. Checked Mike’s e-mails, he’d had one from Paul who was now in Luxembourg and had been using our big brown book on the Moselle/Rhine. Told him he could add notes for future reference. The e-mail Mike sent to our insurers had failed, so I sent it again. The crew off Harmony came back, they said the distance to station was walkable so they would leave the car where it was. Turned out we’d met before when we were at Le Bassin Rond and the skipper (who had been a big fan of Bill’s Witterings) came to invite Bill on his boat. (Harmony was up for sale now that the crew had done the five years here that they had originally set out to do) Packed up and drove back to the boat.