We left Cape Charles at 6:00 this morning, motoring tediously through the shallow places. We got out with out touching the bottom, sailed under the Chesapeake Bridge Tunnel, and are now about 45 miles outside the Bridge Tunnel, and 20 miles off the coast of North Carolina (near Kitty Hawk), moving smartly at 5 to 6 knots. The most amazing thing that happened today is that we have had a T-Mobile signal nearly all day. Better than at home.
Today, we have found ourselves inundated by small biting flies the size of a small house fly. They have come onboard while we have been up to 20 miles offshore, and I believe they are still coming. We have run into these pests in New England, and once off the coast of New Jersey, while sailing with my friend Peter. Perhaps ours are from New Jersey as we have a North wind today. They aren’t too bad unless you are trying to sleep. We have made much sport hunting down perhaps 200 of these buggers, and the decks are littered with a multitude of tiny corpses. The are rather easy to target, and both Salli and I have a “batting average” of perhaps 350. The trick is to hold the swatter in the middle, like it has a short handle.
At some point we will kill the last fly, and we will be vermin free until we get to Bermuda. We also had some other insects. At the marina, there was a wasp that clearly had made a home in our barbecue. I decided to leave her alone, figuring that we would sail away from her, and she couldn’t get back to her nest. Last night, I opened the barbecue for its intended purpose, and found the nest inside with four nearly adult sized wasps. I knocked the nest into the water, but the wasps kept trying to get back to the barbecue. I killed two of them, cooked a batch of ribs, and closed it up. Today, 30 miles offshore, there was a wasp flying around trying to get back into the barbecue. Where did it stay last night? In the smoky barbecue? The wasps are now gone, soon too the flies. The same phenomenon happens to contagious diseases. After a couple days at sea, it is unlikely for crew to catch a new disease.
We leave the spiders alone. They are on our side.