Dera..dera..dera..dera....Batman!!!
Scot Free III
Frank & Anne
Tue 12 Dec 2017 02:00
We had a fraught few days just prior to C arriving. Our intruder alarm kept going off overnight. I mounted guard, saw nothing, but it still went off, so not pirates. I diagnosed bats, switched off the alarm and went to bed.
We subsequently found a half eaten apple and some droppings. A furious Internet search and a close examination of the said droppings (who said sailing was glamorous) and we were convinced that it was a bat. The poo didn't quite stack-up with Google's description, but then, bats do like apples.
Next night I made sure we used all the hatch mosquito netting to keep them out. As soon as it got dark I saw something moving, not a bat, but a rat, a bloody big one trying to work its way around the netting.
Impossible!!! We had not been in a marina for weeks and it certainly didn't stowaway and join the ship's crew in Antigua. We closed up the boat and hid, in the heat, inside until it got light; then went off to the nearest supermarket. Where, in the pest-control aisle, we met an Italian couple also buying rat traps, there was a lot of empty shelf space, perhaps there was a run on rat related products.
They were also on a boat, moored quite close to us. Over coffee we concluded that being moored very close to shore the rats must have swam out and climbed on-board on the previous very still night. Probably after the locals made a concerted effort to move them out of the sheds and workshops along the front.
A hire car, to get to a proper hardware store, and €100+ later, we were equipped with traps, poison, glue boards, a fishing trident and a very smart cage with a trap door. We decided to move across the bay to Ilet a Couchons just in case any of his friends decided to join him.