Warning! Warning!! Warning!! If you have a bad case of Arachnophobia (fear of spiders) do not read today’s blog.

When we returned to Leu Cat last week, after exploring Australia, we discovered that our boat was covered with the dead remains of these tiny mosquito-like bugs. The first thing I did was wash down the boat to remove these little suckers. Since then, every evening when it gets dark, these bugs come out and are attracted to the lights in our salon. They are so small that they find ways to come in even though we have our hanging screen door on. We have since made it a habit to close the sliding door, which is behind the screen. This has worked to keep the bugs out of our boat but they congregate outside of the door, in our stern cockpit.

During the night, they die and fall to the floor so in the morning, I have to take our vacuum and vacuum them up. However, they seemed to have also attracted spiders onto the outside of our boat. I have tried to wash the spiders down from their webs that they spin and flush the spiders into the water. Unfortunately, this has been a losing battle. When we went shopping the other day, I bought two large canisters of bug bomb so I could spray the outside of the boat to get rid of them. However, the last couple of days it has been too windy to use the spray.

This morning, the wind had died down so I grabbed the canisters and went outside. When I did, I felt like Frodo, the main character of the movie, Lord of the Rings, when he entered the lair of Shelob, the huge spider. Soon I was covered in webs with spiders dancing all around me, licking their chops. I was the biggest dinner they had seen since Sam recued Frodo. I had visions of a black mass of spiders marching down the deck of the boat, getting ready for their feast.

Fortunately, I had brought my 3 foot long machete with me and hacked clear of the webs before the moving mass of black spiders reached me. OK, OK, so I am exaggerating a little bit but you get the idea of how bad it was. Yuck!!! I methodically sprayed down the deck, the safety net that covers our lifelines (which were truly covered with webs) the dock lines and the fenders. It took both large canisters and by the time I was done, the place was littered with dead and dying spiders. There must have been a couple of hundred of them. Double Yuck. I then spent the next hour washing down the boat and flushing those nasty things into the water.

I just can’t figure why Mary Margaret decided to stay inside the salon all day but I suspect that it might have something to do with the screaming and yelling I did while battling those nasty little critters…

As I worked throughout the day on some of our minor but time consuming boat projects, I would spy a spider or two that have escaped my morning battle. I took great joy in individually killing them. I know that I will need to spray down the boat a couple of more times before we are fully victorious in our battle with the Arachnids since I killed a number of nests that contains hundreds of babies but I am sure that I may have missed a few under the bridge deck between the two hulls. However, it is a 1000 percent better and I am determined to win this battle. Fortunately, we have not found any inside our boat so we sleep well at night.