This is a change in the format of an SHPC. I have realized that the
program `inst_eddies` may not find any eddy at a given date and
orientation (as in the test `No_eddy`), so we cannot guarantee that
the first date present in the shapefiles corresponds to the first line
in `ishape_lat.txt`. So we store the initial date explicitly in a text
file. We could deduce the final date from the initial date and the
number of lines in `ishape_lat.txt` but we can avoid counting the
lines and just store the date range.