Aboard No Boundaries
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
I’m sitting right where you think I am – in the cockpit. I love my little Dell mini. It is only 9”, but it has a complete keyboard, although some of the keys are in strange places. I can see the Word document clearly, but I struggle to see the cursor. It is bad enough in the glare around me to try to find the little arrow, but finding Word’s insertion point is a real challenge sometimes. It is, in fact, the primary downside to blogging in the cockpit.
As I was preparing to go below to get the computer, I saw what I consider to be the nemesis of boat life – a large black spider. Nobody knows why spiders like boats so much, but there are a lot of stories about them. Personally, I hate them. I love spiders in the woods where they build huge wagonwheel webs to catch insects. I hate spiders on my boathome scuttling about in the cockpit drain. When I see a spider, I pull out all the stops.
In this case, I pulled off my shoes. I found that if I banged them on the deck near the drain where the spider scurried about planning his dastardly deeds, such as invading my bed in the middle of the night, he would stop running, turn around and run the other way. Next I figured out that I could drag one shoe in the drain on one side, which sent him running the other way, and use the other shoe to trap him. He thought he had figured out his escape when he ran under a piece of lint in the drain, but that was his undoing. I smacked the piece of lint with all my might. Maybe it was seven blows, maybe not, but that spider is in webworld heaven now.
During the years that we lived in Baltimore, we were lucky about bugs. In my language, “bugs” covers a multitude of undesirable creatures – flies, spiders, cockroaches and centipedes. We had the occasional impudent fly, along with intermittent visits from wasps and bees. However, we had none of the vermin reputed to infest many harbors. For that, we are profoundly grateful. Now that we have set to sea, we may have a bigger battle on our hands. We shall see.
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