THE PLAGUE REDUX

Written by Doug Weibel, Frolic

Author’s note:  this episode happened to us quite a number of years ago, but still makes us laugh.  We hope you will get a kick out of it and maybe a special waypoint in your chart plotter!

Sometimes you have a problem and think it is something you should learn from.  Other times you chalk it up to something that is not likely to happen to you again.  My wife and I have run into a problem, and after the second time know it is something we should learn from.

Our two run-ins with this unpleasant mess both occurred in the spring, in successive years, while sailing our boat north from Florida or the Bahamas to the Chesapeake bay.  In both cases we had made an offshore passage from South Carolina to Beaufort, North Carolina and were proceeding up the Intra-coastal Waterway, rather than rounding Cape Hatteras offshore.  After coming inshore mid-day we proceeded up Goose Creek, the Pamlico, Pungo and Alligator rivers, and connecting canals, and had made it through the Alligator river swing bridge less than an hour before sundown.  With no severe weather forecast we anchored close in off the northeast side of Sandy Point, at the mouth of the Little Alligator river.

The first year there were several other boats anchored in the area and it seemed like a fine settled weather anchorage, and, being tired and ready for bed early, we spent a perfectly pleasant night shut up in the boat.  Unfortunately we woke up to what seemed like a plague of biblical severity.  Sliding back the companion hatch set off a buzzing cloud of mosquitos.  We were horrified to find, literally, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of mosquitos all over the boat.  They particularly liked the canvas, and covered it at a density of a couple hundred bugs per square foot.  Inside the dodger, outside the dodger, on top and under the bimini, and all over the sail cover there was not a square centimeter to be found uninhabited.  They were pretty much everywhere else as well, though not as dense.  You could not take a step without setting off a small buzzing cloud and squashing many laggards.

I have always been particularly attractive to biting insects, while my wife gets chewed up a bit more in the average range.  Fortunately it appeared that most of these bugs were not yet in the blood sucking life-stage and I escaped our initial trip on deck with no more than a dozen bites.  We hustled back below deck and spent a few minutes battling the mosquitos that followed us inside with the fly swatter.  Then, with a change of clothes including long sleeves, long pant-legs, hoods and gloves we went back on deck, got the anchor up and got underway.  My wife, Marjorie, bless her soul, took pity on me after I got the first bite on my face, and let me go back below.  She got us out the channel at the mouth of the Alligator river and set course across Albermarle Sound.

I made and ate my breakfast while occasionally looking through the companionway windows to see Marjorie, hood drawn tight, scowling and persevering.  After the sun had been up a good two hours, and our guests showed no interest in leaving, I thought I’d encourage them to shove off.  I bundled back up and grabbed our spray can of insect repellant.  I slid back the companionway hatch and started blasting away at the underside of the dodger - yes I know you are supposed to apply insect repellant to your person, but under the circumstances it seemed appropriate to apply it to the boat.  “You idiot!”, Marjorie screamed.  “They were all sitting still and now you’ve got them riled up and all over me!.”  Chagrined, I retreated back below deck.

Not content to sit still long, I soon made an appearance back on deck and headed up to the bow.  I hooked up our anchor wash down hose and attacked the invaders on the sail cover with the spray nozzle.  Once again there was a howl from the helm and I was ordered to desist.  I cleared a spot on the front of the cabin top and had a seat to ponder our predicament.  I was not content to try and wait it out with no sign of the wind filling in, and the sun climbing in the sky seeming to offer no help.  Finally, I hit upon a better idea - we did have a tool onboard that could be a help!  Once more I headed below and reemerged holding our little shop-vac and trailing an extension cord.  Ah, we finally have a real need for that AC inverter!  With the shop-vac whining I started sucking up mosquitos from the underside of the dodger.  By moving the hose slowly I was able to clear a path of the little buggers without disturbing many outside the swath who were able to escape the suction.  Within an hour you could stand in the cockpit without feeling like you were in some sort of torture chamber.  Mid second-hour Marjorie took the vacuum on deck and started clearing the sail cover.  Further efforts in the cockpit met with limited success as the now higher bug density forward had them migrating aft as fast as we were getting rid of them.  After three hours we felt we had won the battle and could take mercy on the survivors, so long as they kept to themselves till they saw fit to fly away on the wind.  What an ordeal!

Well, perhaps we should have learned but the next year we found ourselves clearing the Alligator swing bridge not long before sunset and we headed for the same anchorage.  We reasoned that since we were a full month earlier than the prior year, and since it was probably just a seasonal problem, we would probably be just fine.  After sunset we started to see some mosquitos landing on the underside of the dodger and it dawned on us that maybe we had misjudged and walked right in to the same mess.  We have on board a Thermacell, a small butane powered insect repellant device, that we have rarely used and then only in Florida to combat no-see-ums.  We decided to give it a try, so dug it out, put in a fresh butane cartridge and repellant pad, started it up and set it under the dodger.

I am not an entomologist but I can tell you after a quick Google search that there are over 175 species of mosquitos in the U.S.  I don’t know if the Thermacell works against other species of mosquito, or what species flourishes at the mouth of the Little Alligator river in springtime, but I can definitively tell you that the Thermacell device does not work as a repellant against that species of mosquito.  When we went up on deck the following morning we found something different from, but equally as repulsive as, the previous year.  Again there were tens of thousands of mosquitos, but this time a majority of them were dead.  That sounds like a relatively good thing, but one not so good detail was that whatever fatal malady the Thermacell caused in these mosquitos a side effect was that, in their death throes, they excreted some sort of a blue, dye-like substance.  So, we were to contend with some lesser number of live mosquitos making us miserable while we undertook the tasks of vacuuming them and their expired brethren up, then scrubbing the boat from stem to stern.

I am very thankful that our boat can mostly take care of itself, and that there was no traffic to contend with on Albemarle sound that morning.  We were very preoccupied, Marjorie with the vacuum and I with the hose and scrub brush, as we crossed the sound.  What a sight we must have been, and what a mess!  Imagine hosing down the side deck and having to clear away big handfuls of dead mosquitos to unclog the side-deck drains!  Ugh.  We found the blue stuff didn’t really adhere to the canvas and fortunately deck cleaner and a vigorous scrubbing removed the blue evidence of the massacre from the fiberglass.  Afterwards the only remaining damage were some blotchy blue bands on our mainsail that were out of reach of the spray from our wash down hose.  Those, and our vacuum.  Our vacuum smells like mosquitos, which is not a good smell.  You didn’t know mosquitos have a smell?  Well, squash 10,000 of them in your vacuum and then you will know what they smell like, and good luck getting the smell out of the corrugated hose.

This seems like a tall tail, but you can ask my wife Marjorie about it.  I’d be safe in saying that no amount of money could entice her to anchor off Sandy Point again; she would rather ride out a gale anchored in the middle of the Albemarle sound.  As a public service we are recommending that all cruisers enter a waypoint in their plotter or tablet at 35 degrees 55.60 minutes North, 76 degrees 00.76 minutes West.  If your plotter lets you choose cute icons pick the skull and crossbones.  Label it “anchorage of last resort.”

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