July 1, 2005 - UNWELCOME BOARDERS
by Michel & Jane DeRidder

Rats, ants, thieves and weevils,
moths, mosquitos, flies and fleas.
Ants, wasps, spiders, sandflies,
pirates, possums, Go 'way! Please!

The first visitor to board us unbidden was in North Vancouver in the wee small hours. We were moored alongside, waiting to be hauled out the following morning. I awoke to find an uninvited boarder playing a flashlight's beam around the stern cabin where we slept. I yelled, "Get out! What do you think you're doing?" Michel, trying to calm me, held me down, telling me it was just a bad dream. By the time I'd convinced him that someone was indeed on the boat, the intruder was already running up the dock, and my naked protector hadn't a show.

The next such incident came a night or so later, when a sneak thief came up the ladder, removed a new multi-band radio and a sealed beam light as we slept, two big losses as we were about to sail off on our first ever offshore cruise. We found our car keys at the foot of the ladder under the boat. We learned to be far more careful thereafter, stringing a fishing line across the cockpit to trigger the ratchet on the reel in order to alert us of boarders, but they never came. In all our decades afloat, those have been our only thefts.

For some years we used the ploy used by the Smeetons on Tzu Hang. They used to leave everything wide open and a radio playing. We'd looked them up in St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francicso many many years ago, finding Tzu Hang as I describe, and jumped to the conclusion that they were nearby. Not so. They'd gone for the day. These days however, we seldom leave the boat without locking up. Times have changed.

A giant rat must have smelled the stew I had simmering when we were tied up to shop at a shoreside facility. We heard the pit-a-pat of its feet scurrying around the deck in the night and found unmistakable signs of its presence the following morning. (You can tell a species by its feces.) We knew enough to avoid using poison, having heard the story of a family forced to evacuate their boat for several weeks until an unlocatable corpse had ceased to foul their habitat. (Boats have unreachable cavities.) Instead, we bought and baited a trap. The rat trap cheese disappeared, leaving the trap unsprung. We wised up and wired bacon rind to the wee platform the next day. I heard the trap go off during the night. In the morning there was no sign of the rat, only bloody footsteps here and there around the cockpit and stern deck. We sniffed around for days seeking its hidey-hole before concluding the terrified rat must have leapt off the transom.

We were once invaded by tiny brown ants. They marched in trails, touching antennae as they passed one another. We tried most every spray we could lay our hands on, but still they increased and multiplied. We were mesmerized by the ant trails. I thought I'd go crazy. We finally fought back with 'TexAnt', a syrup dispensed from a mini-squeeze container, placing poison drops on their well-defined trails. That got rid of the pests in short order. Months later we'd find nests of dead ants between the pages of a book or in the back of a seldom used drawer.

Larger black ants don't seem to keep to well beaten tracks. I've brought such mini-invaders aboard occasionally with the flowers that I do so love. I could have avoided the problem by not giving up on the flowers. We've found a commercial product of sweet jellied poison, which will make the ants disappear, if placed on lids on deck, or in the cockpit out of the rain, or under lockers below decks.

Weevils and meal moths occasionally come in with grain-based foodstuffs, usually but not always in out-of-the-way tropical countries. Weevils are no big problem. Dump the offending produce overboard to feed the fish, or if you've no other flour or rice, just sieve out what you can, and ignore the rest (or think of them as extra protein). I remember baking a peach pie in Suvarov in the Cook Islands, one with a delicately speckled crust. Willy de Roos, later to become a North West Passage navigator, was thoroughly enjoying the dessert until he learned of the reason for the dots in the pastry. He couldn't bring himself to finish his portion. All the more for us, we reckoned.

Meal moths are by no means as easy to get rid of, as we were to discover to our horror. They too are introduced to the vessel by buying already infested food, so beware. Examine the foodstuff for telltale cobwebby sticky patches. The only solution is to get rid of all infested foods and their packaging (cookies, cereals, flour, pasta, seeds, popcorn) unless you can freeze the items for some considerable time, we were told. The trouble is pantry moths are voracious feeders and eat their way through plastic and cardboard containers. In other words, Ziploc bags are no protection. They reproduce like crazy in houses as well as on boats. We eventually managed to rid ourselves of the problem by the above measures, plus using an ice pick to pierce their nests in crevices, but it took months. However, I have just learned of a quick solution - a pantry moth pheromone trap using a natural sex attractant - pre-baited glue traps! (www.flybusters.co.nz in New Zealand)

The universally loathed cockroach is perhaps the most repulsive of all vermin. Avoidance is the best measure. Don't let 'em on. Unload all boxes, bags and fresh produce in the dinghy. Examine everything before placing on deck. We have on many occasions had a scampering of roaches in the dinghy. We sprinkle boric acid powder (boracic acid - available in chemists most everywhere) in the backs of lockers and drawers to kill any that may come aboard in spite of our precautions. We have been lucky never to have had an infestation, perhaps because Magic Dragon's hull is red cedar strip planking and may act as an aromatic cedar chest - though we have seen the occasional lethargic loner, and the odd dead roach in the bilge. If cockroaches do gain a foothold, get a bomb and fumigate. It will be necessary to leave the vessel for a day or two.

Mosquitoes, wasps, flies and sandflies are annoyances, or worse - potential death-dealing disease carriers. Once again, avoidance is the best solution - anchoring far enough offshore to escape the worst of them, using screening and mosquito netting, wearing long-sleeved, long-legged garments, shoes and socks, and insect spray ashore after sunset. Mosquito coils are said to be harmful but we keep them for emergencies such as still nights. Many are the cruises that have come to an abrupt end because of malaria, denghe fever, or some mysterious illness contracted from mosquitoes in particular, and we also know of cases of fly-borne hepatitis.

Spiders we treat with respect, knowing that they eat flies and book mites. When one of our resident spiders gets frighteningly large, Michel catches it in a jar or box and deposits it ashore.

Possums - NZ Bush Babies - are an encroaching problem, overrunning the country in ever-increasing numbers as fresh roadkill will attest. Trouble is they can swim out to boats and climb up anchor rodes and mooring lines, as we discovered not once but twice. One stomped about the deck in the night and woke us. When we tried to encourage it to leave using a swinging deck brush, it merely ran up onto our forward piling, and smiled down on us. So Michel got out an old BB gun that we hadn't used for years. The over-oiled weapon sent its pellet out through the grease to land harmlessly at his feet. He took the boat hook and finally managed to scrape the possum from the top of the pole. It clung to the mooring line, refusing to be shaken off. I don't remember how we finally persuaded it to swim for shore.

As for pirates, how lucky we have been in that respect, never to have been attacked as have some ill-fated cruisers. It may be that we have seldom frequented pirate territory. It could be sheer dumb luck. We are very aware of our great good fortune after all these many years. As we approach our 50th wedding anniversary in a few days time, forty of those years on Magic Dragon, we often say, "Our portion of tragedy has yet to be dealt".