The underside of our boat is in fine shape, you'll be pleased to hear. It's really quite clean, there is a propeller and a rudder, and no obvious damage. You will no doubt think that we have either had Liberty out of the water, or sent down a diver, or have been snorkelling ourselves. Actually, none of the above. Read on...

As you'll know if you're a dedicated reader of these blogs, while Liz went back to the UK for half term in late May, I stayed on Liberty, moored on the quayside at the pretty southern port of Marseillan.

I had a list of jobs to do on the boat during her absence, but also took one of the bikes to explore Marseillan. Being Friday I also discovered the weekly brocante (antiques and bric-a-brac) market just at the end of the marina. Lovely, and some great stuff, most of which I had to ignore pending Liz finding an apartment in Liverpool for us to buy. I didn't know it at the time, but she did find us an apartment, whereas all I bought was a set of boules for €15, something we'd been looking for ever since we had to leave our own set back in NZ. Hopefully both purchases will give us some pleasure.

Marseillan was a nice little place, very well kept, and with a lot more obvious affluence than Beaucaire where we spent the winter.

And there were some enigmatic characters. One regular was a tousle-haired man of about 45 who drove a drop-top car. I nicknamed him Claude, because he looked like a Claude. He wore jeans and brown loafers, and each morning he'd arrive on the quay, park his car, and have a coffee in the brasserie near our boat. Then he would drive round to the other side of the marina, park his car, and have a pot of tea at one of the cafes on that side. After which he'd move himself and his car a few metres down towards the sea and have yet another tea or coffee at a different establishment. If he had a job he certainly was in no hurry to get to work. But he was always alone. And presumably had a bladder of steel because after all that refreshment I never saw him head for a toilette.

Then there was Lei-Lei the ginger cat. She, I think, lived in one of the houses on the quayside in between the many cafes and restaurants. She was very vocal, and would meow her story of woe (well, it always sounded sad... 'I've never been fed', 'Nobody loves me,' etc) to anyone who would listen and give her ears a scratch. I was one such, and was delighted to arrive back to the boat one day to find her curled up asleep on the 'Welcome Aboard' mat.

She did this a couple of times, and frequently came to say hello during my stay, though she'd still hit upon any stranger within range, so it's not like I was her best mate. Some obviously knew her, which is how I know her name was Lei-Lei. Unless it's just French for 'puss'.

There were others too, such as English Jenny who repeated everything three times. There's a storm coming. A storm. A storm's coming. And she asked me, why do you have a beard? A beard? Why a beard? Well Jenny, I like it, like it, like it.

Having booked into the port for almost two weeks I was going to be one of the longer-serving tenants on the quay, as most of the other boats stayed for only a day or two. And most of them were hire boats, which meant I was never short of entertainment. Why watch Die Hard 4 when you can watch a hire boat crew Try Hard 1? Altough some of them were Trying Hard to Die, given the complete cock-up they made of mooring. Liz and I had seen many examples of mooring by commitee on the Canal du Midi, so none of this came as a surprise. Sophie and Richard, friends of ours who have their boat moored at Marseillan, said they always went to help hire boats because the crews didn't usually know what they were doing, whereas mean old me was happy to sit back with a glass of wine and enjoy the spectacle.

Well, not entirely true because I did often go and help, though I found that the crews sometimes didn't know what help I could give and so didn't know how to use me. Just throw me the rope, I would think loudly, but they'd be too busy running backwards and forwards, reversing and turning, screaming and yelling at each other and generally doing everything... except mooring.

It was during one of these circus displays that I was given a poignant reminder that it's never too soon to go on an adventure.

A hire boat crew chaotically arrived in front of Liberty, but one of them, an older man - possibly mid-seventies - found it all too much and had to sit down on the quayside, resting against a bollard while the remainder of the bungle moored the boat. Within half an hour it was obvious he wasn't well because an ambulance had arrived, followed by a doctor, and he was eventually taken off to hospital with drip and oxygen mask in place.

I never saw him return. Which is not to say he didn't make it, but if you have a dream there's no time like the present. (I am allowed to say wise things now, even cliched, because I am in my sexties)

I did something to the boat each day, including working on the propeller shaft flange which, you will (of course) remember, became detatched back in December and cost us over €150 to get fixed 'professionally'. This time, because we'd been monitoring the state of the nuts and bolts, we knew it was starting to come loose again, so I invested in some spring washers and fitted them. This time, doing the work myself, it cost €3. We are getting better at this boating lark.

Likewise the boat boiler's pressure relief valve (see previous blog called Pressure Relief). We sourced one online in the UK and fitted it ourselves, total cost £12. If we'd got a local 'professional' to do it I suspect we'd be another €150 short. Boats. Tchah.

Liz finally returned, shattered from her busy UK trip and promptly fell asleep, but to be fair she had viewed around ten apartments, as well as picked up and ferried Yasmin, done shopping, and other business.

She also brought back my birthday present... which she gave me four days' early because she knew I would have a good use for it, and Sunday would be too late. The reason was the water in the marina, which was crystal clear. The present was a GoPro Hero3+, which is a multi-functional video camera about the size of a cigarette packet and which comes with a waterproof housing. It shoots professional broadcast-quality video (even up to Hobbit-speed 48 frames per second), shoots photos, has burst-photo, self-timer and even time-lapse features. And it can do all these underwater if required. It's a brilliant piece of kit, which I love. It was the best present.

So, we just had to try it out underwater to see - for the first time - what the underside of our boat looked like. I had planned to take it swimming in the Etang de Thau the day before we left but the wind had got up and it was choppy, and I'm a wimp, so instead we stayed in the marina, attached the GoPro to the boat hook and lowered it underwater.

(I now have an app on the iPad that allows me to see wirelessly in real time what the GoPro sees, a fantastic bonus, but on the day it went swimming we didn't have it, so had to plug it into the PC to watch the video)

It was like exploring with Jaques Coisteau or James Cameron. The clarity was astounding, and there was the hull, the propeller, the rudder, the bow thruster, seaweed, sand, rocks and lots of fish. The hull is really very clean, with a slight coating of algae, and some obvious scrapes and scratches where we'd gone past submerged trees on the canals, but no damage.

Fantastic. Maybe I'll use it to do some time-lapse footage of hire boat crews mooring their boats. Should be good for a laugh.