All was going well yesterday until I handed MWNN a mug of tea up through the rear hatch, in the pouring rain. I reached to put it up on the roof in front of him and spilled hot tea on myself. MWNN had just exited from a lock and had full throttle on. Concerned that I had been scalded, he reached for the mug, swinging the boat towards the bank as he did so. I yelled a warning and he dropped the roof hatch to regain control of the tiller. A swift 'ward off' saved me from decapitation but the steel hatch crashed down on my left hand, catching the two middle fingers. I removed my rings on the way to get the First Aid box. MWNN shouted that there was a spray in the box - he thought I'd been burned and was unaware of the damage to my hand. I applied arnica liberally to the knuckles. With two fingers strapped together and a swollen left eye from a mossie bite, people could be forgiven for thinking there'd been 'a domestic' between the two of us. I'm very lucky not to have broken fingers or a fractured skull and consider swollen joints a near miss that could be prevented by fitting a McLaren strut to the roof hatch.

Despite the accident, we made very good progress, lunched at Rolampont where we'd planned to stop for the night, and motored on to a lovely wide basin mooring at Fullain, truly rural but just 5mins walk to an artisan baker's shop and right beside the walled cemetery where a funeral had just ended as we pulled in at 4.30.

With no light pollution, the stars were brilliant in the early part of the night, but by the time the dog woke us at 5am desperate to go ashore for a pee, the clouds had rolled over them. Loony GSD's leg is no better so we have switched her to the steroid pills and will be looking for a Vet at the next decent sized town. We also need a medic for MWNN's eye which he neglected to treat when he got grit in it and now looks truly horrible.

The President of the Cruising Association (a relative of the French couple withy whom we shared locks up a section of the climb to Langres) of these parts tells me that there is a launderette in the Capitainerie at Chaumont. If this proves to be true, we will moor there tonight and become honorary members of the Association. I just HAVE to get one of their T-Shirts, saying I'm a member of L'A.N.C.R.E. (If you're not a Discworld fan you won't get that one).

We pulled into the mooring at Chaumont just after the lunch stop that left us moored two locks upstream of the Port de Plaisance. A NZ couple are moored here awaiting the arrival of friends and tell me there IS a drying machine at the Capitainerie. Unfortunately it doesn't open until 4pm so there's a couple of hours wait. The sun came out about 30 minutes ago so I'm tempted to put the bed linen through the 'barrel' and use the sheets as shade for the back deck.