Dear friends,

I've actually made it to the Mediterranean! I'm in a large marina at Cap D'Agde which is surrounded by a huge tourist complex and have just put up the mast and mainsail and it feels like I'm on a sailing boat again!

I had three days in Carcassone and sorted out various things, in particular the silencer so that everything in the motor department is now operating better. Suzy arrived with a sprained ankle that hadn't healed but it got better as the weather improved, but it meant she wasn't jumping in and out of the boat, which is what canals are all about.

Actually the east end of the Canal du Midi is the most beautiful, even tho flatter and not so interesting historically. It meanders round vineyards and red tiled villages and the trees lining the canal are varied. There is a "long pound" of 54km between locks on this stretch, one of the longest in the world and it ends in a dramatic 7 lock drop in Beziers (actually the last one, into the Aude river, isn't used as there is an aqueduct over the river these days). We lucked out by being in Beziers for the first night of a "spectacle" called "Mon royaume pour un canal" which was acted out on a platform on the 6th lock and the surrounding banks. It was done with great vigour and although we didn't understand all the subtleties of the (French) dialogue it was great fun, with horses galloping, French court scenes with all the trimmings and labourers contructing the canal.

The Canal du Midi is actually one of the greatest achievements of French engineering -- the first canal to join two oceans, finished in 1686. It was masterminded by an aging gatherer of salt taxes in the region, Paul Riquet and completed in 16 years. His big insight was realising that there was a good water supply in the mountains above the watershed between the Atlantic and Mediterranean and his genius was persuading the king, Louis XIV, to cough up most of the money.which, at 15M livres is almost impossible to imagine in today's currency. (Mind you, he ended up 3M in debt at the end and it took his family generations to claw it back from the canal.)

So after Beziers we got to a 3-door lock at Agde which leads out to the river, and while Suzy went off to the beach (it was her last day) I negotiated my way out and eventually moored outside the town on a public mooring pontoon which was the only practical spot in the river. Agde has a history dating back to 500BC and is a lovely town with a local nightlife totally separate to the tourists down by the river. The next day after Suzy caught her train back to Toulouse (2 hours for what had taken me nearly 2 weeks!) I headed out of the river and into the Med for the first time, tho of course without sail.

The last two days the wind has been howling in from the Northwest at force 4-6 even in the marina so what I'm going to find when I venture out I don't know. But I've found another contact from the Cruising Association who's arriving on Wednesday and I hope I'll have made it to Montpelier by that time. She's a catholic teacher from Dublin who's done a lot of sailing holidays. The next week I'll have Matt and Marc joining as well to do the crossing to Corsica and Italy (two young enthusiastic would-be sailors from Poole) and the week after that Guy is coming out to Italy. So most things are working out, although it's taking longer than I planned.

There's a lovely English couple, Derek and Jann, a few berths down from me, who are going into the canals, having spent a couple of years going the long way round Spain. So I've been able to pass on the excellent shearlegs that Robert made for the mast and the tyres that I had festooning the sides of the boat (which didn't unfortunately prevent all the scratches). They're from Falmouth and have a beautiful wooden boat called Great Days. And the (French) neighbours have been very helpful (even tho their accents are weird and I have great difficulty understanding them) because it's even tricky in a marina when the wind is blowing hard and one is solo -- I had to go over the other side today to get the mast up. When I arrived I thought I'd have a lesson in mooring fore and aft and so got someone from the Capitanerie to come over and help me, but in the event there are more finger pontoons where I'm moored than in an English marina (one between each boat) so I needn't have worried. But I am learning to ask for help which can't be a bad thing!

I'm dying to get back to sailing, but still have a few things to do on the boat so I'll not be off before Monday or even Tuesday. But it's a real milestone to be here. The swimming and snorkeling has been great but I don't take to the hoards who crowd out the tourist facilities. I'm looking for quiet anchorages...

love
Chris