'The Bag', a Plague and a cunning plan!

Zoom in to witness the full horror of the plague that beset me at 'The Bag' last night. More gorey details can be seen here..

But in fact these two photos, that I took from the companionway this morning, do not, capture any where near the magnitude of the millions of knats that invaded the boat last night. On exiting the cabin I could see that over 70% of the cockpit, cockpit superstructure and the cabin top AND the dinghy, were covered with their corpses (though some were still alive). The previous night was bad enough but this was horrendous. It took me 3 hours to remove most of the dead bodies. They were horribly sticky, so neither sweeping them or swilling them with seawater alone, was enough. I had to scrub all surfaces viguoursly with seawater to get rid of the blasted things.

I thought about moving the boat down the river to the town away from the woods on the nearby shore, but two things mitigated against that. One was that this is such a beautiful, quiet spot that I was reluctant to give it up. Second my natural laziness - I didn't want the hassle of moving. What's more I had a cunning plan.

The Anchor Light on Bonny is low down on the cockpit superstructure and is VERY bright. I saw the wretched creatures swarming around it last night. I therefore figured that a light high up in the rigging would attract the bastards up there and would hopefully keep them off the boat. So I invested in 4 new durecell 'D' batteries whilst in Salcombe, for the LED lantern and hoisted it up the mast. Will it work? I'll let you know in the next post.

In other news.... whilst I was scrubbing the waterline from the dinghy, a couple came over and introduced themselves, Barbara and Mike were OCC members and their boat, Salsa and home mooring, were just across the creek from me. They had spotted our OCC house flag (thanks to Mick) and came to say hello. My, they had a tale to tell, including being struck by lightning in Panama, and abandoning ship mid Atlantic in stormy weather with the keel working lose! The bolts had  probably been damaged by the lightening strike.

After lunch I took the dinghy into Salcome and wandered around...

The views are delightful and the town was certainly more vibrant than Kingsbridge.

On the way I noticed another sailing aquaintance had just arrived. John Ashbrook in his smart Achilles 9 metre. I met John in 2019 on the Jester Baltimore Challenge. This time he was nearing the end of a round Britain cruise that he started in April!

I had a pint and then some fish and chips, which were, I am sad to say, rather disappointing. Then back to the boat to set my knat trap before it got dark!