Piscine

Hello everyone - I haven't blogged for a little while - it's been very busy here at Fon du Bourg... what with the gardens, family visits, repairing the drive...

But there's been a little incident that has made me smile and face plant in equal measure over the past couple of weeks.

As a regular reader you will know that the Upper Pool was opened up a few weeks back after getting a new liner.  Last week it was the turn of the Pidge pool - The Pigeonnier, our one bedroomed gite, has its own pool.

Richard, who after being an office worker for thirty seven years, is now the Pool Boy. He's never opened a pool up after the winter so he asked our good friend Ken Austin to come over and give him a hand.

Unfortunately for both of them it turned out there was an issue with the filter (and possibly the pump, too).  Of course the issue wasn't immediately obvious and it was only after much head scratching (by Richard) and standing about in a hole full of snails and spider (again by Richard) that Ken identified the problem.

The problem was with a small part at the bottom of the filter, Richard explained later using a tone of voice that sounded very knowledgeable, which had worn out.

Enter stage left Eric the Pool Man and his son Wye.  They got the pump running pretty much straight away but agreed with Ken about the part at the bottom of the filter.  Wye very kindly did some research, found the part online and Richard ordered it.

Now, bear in mind that Eric is very busy with pools at the moment and was going back to the UK to attend a wedding - he only had a few days to get everything done and our part was arriving on the Thursday.

So the part arrived on Thursday.  Except the ordered part, serial number 40440108 didn't arrive.  Part number 40440408 arrived.

Challenging because it wasn't the part we needed.

So, onto the Spanish company that sent it out and to be fair they did get the correct part to us by Saturday.

Eric, bless him, came to fit the part and refill our filter with sand on Sunday, only to find a second plug on our filter had worn out.  Luckily he had a spare one and after only a little swearing (Eric is a mild mannered man but I did hear him mutter under his breath 'I don't regard this is as very fair'!) the pool is up and running and filtering nicely.

Richard's role in all this was to take the bungs out of the skimmers (!) where the water is collected from the pool to run through the filter.

He opened the first skimmer, no issues.  He opened the second skimmer and found that two whacking great toads had taken up residence.

Now, I have to say Richard is getting better with the wildlife we have here at Fon du Bourg but picking up big ol' toads is still beyond him.  So he got them into the pool net, carefully transported them to some wetland we have here and released them, feeling very happy with himself.  He even went as far as to say that he thought they knew they were being rescued and hung on to the pool net in a very human like way.

I say that he said that after a glass of wine last night!

Anyway, the pool is open, the toads are re-homed, we had wine and all is well here at Fon du Bourg.

Addendum: Toads are fine and we have lots of other interesting wildlife in the grounds.  I love the sound of the cicadas at night, especially as it's so warm here now that we basically live outside from the moment we get up to the moment we go to bed sometime after 10pm.