Bugs on the boat

Let me preface this post by saying that I am in no way an expert on bugs. I’m not even an amateur enthusiast. I am a person that notices bugs, and after our experience last night, I thought I’d share some of the things we’ve learned thus far.

We have bugs on the boat. But for the Caribbean, we experience far fewer bugs than people who reside on land. Our biggest pests are

1. Common house flies. Paul’s enemy. On days with no wind, they creep in through our hatches and buzz around indefinitely. Paul swats at them with towels like I hear boys in locker rooms swatted at each other. His kill rate can’t be very high. They are annoying, and gross, but they don’t hurt us.
2. Mosquitos- Although they are a pest that can make us sick, we luckily haven’t experienced any mosquito related illnesses. We have experienced an almost daily itch that we’ve been forced to scratch. Again, Paul is much more bothered by these pests. He obsessively sprays himself with Off and other brands to try to deter their feasting. I almost never use bug spray, my faulted reason being that eventually they’ll get sick of biting me and move on, and also that if I stand next to Paul, they always seem to prefer him.
3. Butterflies. When we are close to shore, butterflies will occasionally flutter over. 10/10 this experience makes our day special. These are the types of bugs we prefer.
4. Ants. Ants are a terrible nuisance. But the type of ant that we’ve been living with here are worse than the sugar ants I battled with in California. The ants here have WINGS, and hard exoskeletons and come at sundown when our hatches are open in our attempt at enticing a cool breeze into the galley. Last night we had our biggest infestation yet, and it drove us both into some kind of manic paranoia. We closed all the hatches and doors, and Paul stayed outside in the relative cool until the amount of winged visitors became too much. I stayed in the galley, cooking rice over a burner and dripping sweat to taste, watching the increasing numbers of ants on our window. They wanted inside, and I had already noticed that quite a few of them had made it in.

These ants don’t bite. They don’t sting. They don’t really seem to do much other than build up in large quantities and fly around toward bright lights. But they made us feel icky. I left the lights on in the bedroom, and when Paul walked down he found over a dozen on our white sheet. We spent a few minutes going on a murder rampage with a paper towel, and turned off all lights. We turned on lights outside. We sat on the couch sweating in the green house that is our boat sealed up. Finally, we went to bed with ice packs, and found more bugs. Again, another murder rampage ensued, and when we finally lay in bed, every brush of a hair or accidental toe tap caused our adrenaline to spike and frenzied jerks to kick off whatever beast, real or imaginary, we could see. I was scared to turn off my reading light even, imagining them crawling out of the ceiling panels and dropping on us while we slept.

I can’t guarantee that didn’t happen, but eventually, we did sleep. And for the first time in many months, I was the first to rise and sit outside, in the comparatively bug-less morning air. Armed with our deck hose and a broom I swept away 100’s of last nights tiny visitors and am glad we are moving to another anchorage this evening for a quick trip back to Boca Raton for Paul’s work.

-Lindsay, and Paul