Worst bug story

One of the few things I HATE about sailing is dealing with BUGS. I have two stories:

1. The LOVE BUG regatta. One time a bunch of us were doing our Sunday thing and the wind absolutely quit! ZIP!! At this point all the "love bugs" on the planet descended on the fleet, covering sails, sheets, tramps, hair, faces EVERYTHING!!! The result was a fine coating of bug guts on EVERYTHING!!!

2. One fine summer day I waited just a little too long to come in and had to rig down in an absolute cloud of "no see-ums". You had to be there to fully appreciate this horror, but if you ever come to Florida, take this advice: GET OFF THE BEACH BEFORE SUNDOWN!! At least during the summer.

This issue only seems to happen in Central and North FL. We dont have this problem down South.

Maybe its because the bugs dont speak spanish!

Clearly you have not spent much time in the mangroves at sunset!

Pete,
You are not doing much to encourage sailing tourism in Florida.

Pack a can of Deep Woods OFF right next to your sunscreen...

Can't do much for the love bugs, but I've been doing my best to control the population with my car, as evidenced by the windshield!

Wait 'til the Northern Folk start telling about black flies!! Al least "no see-ums" are small!

Don't forget the B-29 bugs that can cover an entire windshield.

Folly Beach in South Carolina is the worst for no-see-ems. In fact, my brother coined the term "going monkey" down there while we were breaking down my Hobie 18 at 5am after about 2 hours of sleep one morning (that's a LONG story). As we're trying to get the boat broken down with the assistance of Chilli (an honest* homeless guy we accidently awoke from a peacefull snooze under "his" Hobie 16). The nats were really descending on us and kept getting thicker and thicker by the second. While rushing to get the mast down my brother said something about getting to see what "going monkey" is all about - but I was too preocupied and pissed at the world (because of the nats, the lack of sleep, a hangover, and having salt and sand in every sweaty crevice of my body) to ask what he meant. About 5 minutes later, we both had peaked our threshold for dealing with the no-see-ems and were running down the street waving our hands over our heads and jumping in the air in an attempt to escape the enslaught of miniscule bugs that must have teeth 10 times the size of their bodies. Immediately I realized what he meant by "going monkey".

As far as the love bugs, my parents house, on top of a high peak all by themselves in TN, was completely inundated with them two years ago...most outside walls were completely blanketed. They come back every year - but have never been as bad. They get in every nook and cranny in the house and we still find them everywhere. Word of advise...they stink when they're dead.

*Chilli, who did genuinely pitch in, later asked for a couple of bucks to buy some beer when the store opened. I never had a homeless guy ask me for anything other than food money and was so impressed that not only was he actually helping without any promise of a return, he actually was truthfull with what he wanted to buy. I gave him a $20...then again, maybe it was the fact that we were done with the boat and escape from the nats was near.

Would you be offended if I named my boat "going monkey"? That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time!

I think you need to tell this "long" story!

Between "going monkey" at Folly Beach- Jake; and "being shot down by the babes at the Coconut"- Matt; there is another Great Ameican Novel in the manner of "Cannery Row".

Heck no! Have at it.

Robi: What can you do with this? Have you ever seen that monkey made out of a sock?

Pete,

Do you mean one like this:

THAT'S IT!! Maybe a name other than Britney!

This is a serious matter, so I better think it over.

Up on Lake Erie we have muffleheads and mayflies (aka Canadian soldiers).

On light-air days in mid-summer we are sometimes swarmed with muffleheads. They don't bite, but they land on everything and crawl around on you. They are strongly attracted to yellow, and I will never forget the year we were in the Sandusky Steeplechase on an all-yellow Hobie 18, and we were wearing yellow life jackets. The muffleheads LOVED us!

Mayflies are born in the water of the lake and when they are mature, they suddenly rise up out of the lake in great swarms. Rick got to experience this up close once when sailing in a distance race on a Corsair 31. It was a dark and windy night, and the boat was going very fast. When these mayflies started swarming up out of the lake, they were hitting the sailors in the face and smashing themselves on the boat, leaving soggy, slippery corpses everywhere. In a big mayfly year, they pile up in drifts in some lakefront towns.

At least both the muffleheads and the mayflies have a very short season, so they are not a common or ongoing problem.

I don't have a story, but in Maine and other parts of the Northeast we have Horseflies (aka green-heads). I suspect that these devilish flies are in other parts of the country. as well.

Unlike mosquitoes which sting, these persistent pests have teeth and they land on you with jaws wide open!!! Worst of all, they ignore bug spray. In fact, I suspect they consider bug spray more of a supper bell than a deterrent!!!

Bill

There are not green headed horseflies in South Carolina that I have ever seen but they certainly are in the northern part of West Virginia where I grew up. They especially like to bite when your skin is wet like when swimming. They really hurt.

Don't get me started about centipedes...

Please don't tell me that centipedes get on sailboats. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

In my other life, I have obtained and briefly tested Autan, or Picardin, a new mosquito repellent originally from fancy German chemists in Europe. It is at Wal-mart, etc. Johnson & Johnson claim it works on Stable flies (the grey ones that look like house flies, but bite). This appeared to be the case when I tried it at my lab last week. I guarantee that the old reliable deet repellent is absolutely useless for stable flies, but remains excellent for most species of mosquitoes and biting midges (the correct name for sandflies & no-see-ums especially near salt water). So who will try Autan for saltmarsh-breeding greenheads or other tabanids that bite sailors? Please respond on this forum!

You're not gettin' off that easy! I sense a story in there somewhere! <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> Out with it!

They get on and in everything, especially if it's moist. Keep those hulls dry!! <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />

I was camped out near the Everglades one night when I was awakened by the sound of two mosquitos nearby.

Mosquito #1: "Should we eat them here or take them back to the swamp?"
Mosquito #2: "Eat them here! If we take them to the swamp the big ones will just steal them away from us."

We don’t really have a bug problem here but we do have a lot of dragon flies. I don’t mind though because they are harmless and quite beautiful. The ones here come in strikingly bright colors they look like flying crayola crayons.

I put a lily pond in back, just for that reason.

I love Dragonflies!
They eat mosquitoes (gotta love that) and do not bite or sting humans. Did you know they live to be about six or seven years old? (ancient for an insect) They are also the worlds fastest insect. They can fly 60 miles per hour. (97 km/h) Not to mention, they are beautiful.

Unfortunately Wendy, your beautiful dragonflies DO have a very short life expectancy! <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

This extract from the FAQ page of the British Dragonfly Society:

"At the shortest, a dragonfly's life-cycle from egg to death of adult is about 6 months. Some of the larger dragonflies take 6 or 7 years! Most of this time is spent in the larval form, beneath the water surface, catching other invertebrates. The small damselflies live for a couple of weeks as free-flying adults. The larger dragonflies can live for 4 months in their flying stage. In Britain, lucky Damsels seldom go more than two weeks and Dragons more than two months. Most Damsels rarely go more than a week, and Dragons two or three weeks. They die from accidents and predation, and large numbers from starvation - in poor weather neither they nor their prey can fly.

So, you see, the vast majority of their lives they aren't the beautiful fly that you so admire.........

Pete, it's a good thing your lily pond attracts dragonflies, because it sounds like a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

True enough, but that larval stage has a voracious appetite for larval mosquitoes! Also, I've seined up some common ditch minnows (no idea what their proper names are), there are NO mosquitoes in my lily pond!

Just out of curiosity, is it necessary to have waterlilies in the pond in order to attract dragonflies to lay their eggs in the pond? How does that work?

It helps to have lilies. The dragon flies glue their eggs to the underside of the lily pads. You would need some type of plant material to hold the eggs until hatching.


The biggest problem I have is encroachment. The dragon flies prefer open space, without spider webs to get caught in. I've culitvated a dense "rain forest" type environment, which I modeled after the Marie Selby Garden in Sarasota. My wife prefers to call it the "vacant lot" or weed infested "no maintenance" environment. She is not a nature lover. She was particularly disenchanted with the water snake who took up residence a few years back.

Also, you should never name the goldfish as herons and raccoons find them very tastey.

Well, thanks for peeing in my Wheaties there John. *JK*

I still love anything that eats mosquitoes even if it is larvae. I think I must be the mosquitoes favorite meal. I had some friends that used to joke that they only asked me to go camping with them so the mosquitoes would leave them alone.

And the adults are beautiful.

Mosquitoes!!!? <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" /> <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Dragonflies must look different in different places. When we had Rick's Place, at a certain of the year we had hundreds of dragonflies zooming around eating mosquitoes, which was good. But the dragonflies certainly weren't beautiful, or even pretty. Just some drab color.

At first it was intimidating to me to walk through the open areas where they were zooming, because I was afraid they were going to run into me. But they seem to have very good reflexes and always manage to avoid large moving objects like people.

After I found out that what they were doing was eating mosquitoes, I was as happy to see the dragonflies as the mosquito plane and the mosquito trucks. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

Lots of differen dragon flys:
http://www.dragonfly-site.com/dragonfly-pictures.html


http://stephenville.tamu.edu/~fmitchel/dragonfly/index.html

better photos here:

http://www.ups.edu/x6267.xml

Biting Greenhead flies:

Expose your teeth
Lick your lips
Grasp the fly by the green head and by the tail
Stretch the green head away from the shoulder of the wings

Good advice! But I have questions:
Is the fly already deceased when you do this?
Do you swallow the head of the fly after biting it off?
If the fly is alive when you decapitate it, can you describe your capture technique?

Has no one else here experienced the charming yellowfly?
Humorous yellowfly story

There are days around here with no-see-ums in the morning, yellowflies in the afternoon and mosquitos at night.

Stump-knockers and warmouths. You had to grow up down here to understand.

My sister was sitting on an Oak root at Fish Eating Creek, trying to put a few warmouths in the bucket, when an otter came out of a hole and dispossessed her from that root!

Years later my nephews scattered her ashes in the creek.