The last 24 hours have been like living a movie...directed by Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino.
It rained yesterday from end to end. We squeezed in a small walk just after dawn and that was it. It rained the rest of the day. Not a drizzle either but a torrent that would inspire ark builders. At the onset we decided to collect some water - we got about 25 gallons off the bimini in a very short time. When we finally retreated inside disaster had struck!
The starboard port had been left open! NO! The gutters below the port had filled...overfilled, actually. Takara's food was floating in a full bowl of water...IAMS spiked with Meow Mix does not exhibit any of the features of Gravy Train for dogs. It didn't make a tantalizing gravy that all cats crave. No, that would be too easy. Instead it turned the food to mush, pussycat porridge. Water had filled the shelf and leaked into Brian's locker. Half of the clothes in said locker were soaked...the cabin now looks like a Ugandan refugee camp.
Violent storms moved through in the afternoon...but as we were busy claning up the morning's mess, we barely noticed.
The rain subsided long enough for us to go into the Palace Saloon for 2 for 1 draft beers and dink back in the next round of showers.
Dusk brought with it a voracious swarm, nay, all encompassing cloud of insects. They swarmed our screens...I could just feel Bird Flu, West Nile, Malaria, Yellow Fever...all beating their wings against our thin veil of protection...
Waking this morning, the screen overhead was STILL black with bugs! The cockpit was swarming. Fog so thick we could hardly see the boat behind and the near shore, not 500' off is obscured. Laundry seemed like the best option for this morning so we cut through the swarm and hopped into the dinghy...
Imagine is you will a scene from Indiana Jones....the walls are crawling with bugs as Indy makes his way through a tunnel...well, the dink was alive! It was a swarming, churning mass of no-see-ums - God's boon to sailors. Heather untied the dink from HP and allowed us to float off before the engine started - a desperate escape attempt. The anchor rode on HP was clogged with flotsam, we thought we'd clear it before going to town...as we approached we were engulfed by winged reinforcements. I thought I saw Heather lifted from the boat for a moment, about to be taken hostage. I throttled that 9.9 horse engine and we sped away.
Did you know that no-see-ums and black flies can fly at least 18mph into a headwind?
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