Sete, France 12/17/1935
Now we come to a Christmas letter again. We reached Sete the day before yesterday and we got your letter for which we thank shamefully. you can be sure we breathed a sigh of relieve when we had the passage through the canal over. The last day we saw us almost run down by one of these awful canal barges and shortly before Sette the canal runs out in a lake about which we had neared bad gossip. While we were in the middle of it the wind came up and we were rolling quite a bit and we were very anxious as to whether the mast would stay where it was laying, it was of course tied very well, but it is also quite heavy and the boom crutch is not designed for to carry such a heavy weight but luckily it stayed where it was and we found our way into the harbor where the reunion with the Mediterranean was quite a big event and we celebrated with a piece of chocolate. Here the weather is good, warm and quiet.
The last 2 days in the canal we had frost and I got frost bitten in the fingers. That is surely life’s irony, I had never had frostbitten fingers in Copenhagen but here 5O km from the Mediterranean I got it. We have passed 190 locks between Bordeaux and here. That takes your strength when you realize that by No. 75 we had blown unsuccessfully in our horn so we had to tie up by the side where for the most part it was not deep enough so afterwards we had half an hour work to get off again. Puh! Here are a lot of yachts and a big yacht club. So here we have all the comforts which we may wish, furthermore we are rid of the tides and all the troubles that follow with them. We now plan to stay here at least a month in order that we can get “Restmore” in shape again and for to get some warmer weather and besides we also need to get a good rest to get ourselves together again. Even Peter is walking around with a cold in his body. Lars has twisted his little foot although it is not worse that he forgets when he runs around like a chicken with a head cut off (literally! like a fly in a bottle) and I have my frostbitten fingers and a burned leg (From hot water) which luckily soon is better but that was nasty experience. Only Anna is in full vigor. She has got a corner tooth and glows as a fire and walks around proudly and is blossoming. Setts is a real southern town; all the fishing boats have latten sails and when 2 men talk together I almost get nervous from fright that they might start fighting with each other because they holler and make so many gestures. In the streets the cloth is hung …….