There was some furry algae, and lots of little barnacles and crabs living on the bottom of the boat so Ken got in the water and scrubbed. After working for an hour or so, he was sitting in the cockpit complaining of water in his ears. I didn’t think much of it because water in the ears always clears up in a short amount of time. A couple of hours later he tells me that it’s not water but critters crawling around in both ears! Augh! Not again! Several years ago he had a spider living in his ear for two weeks that eventually had to be removed by a doctor.

We went to bed hoping that the critters would just leave but within two hours I woke up to him going nuts. The critters were moving around in his ears making all kinds of noise. I got up and looked through our limited supply of medicines and first aid stuff but couldn’t find anything suitable for ear critter removal. I did find a bottle of visine, a q-tip and a bottle of rubbing alcohol so I went to work. I removed the visine from the bottle and replaced it with water. I dipped the q-tip in the alcohol and swabbed out one ear. Well, that pissed the critter off and made him dig in deeper! Crud! What did I do?!? Poor Ken was in pain now. Well, only for about 15 seconds. The critter suddenly stopped moving so I flushed the ear out with my visine water bottle and then moved to the other side.

When I woke up this morning I called out a hello to one of our friends and he said that he had a crab in his ear. He was scrubbing the bottom of his boat that day too. His wife looked in his ear and actually saw the crab in there! She drowned his crab with peroxide.

I’ve since learned that you should use mineral oil to drown critters living in ears. I’ll have to get a bottle to keep on hand for easy ear crab removal.

We moved the boat down to Las Hadas today. We are buddy boating with two other boats and one boat shredded a belt on the way. We held close in order to lend a hand or a tow line but no assistance was needed as he had a spare belt on hand and changed it in about 30 minutes. Luckily the seas were calm today.