CONFESSIONS OF A MASS MURDERER

This is such an exciting time of year for us boaters. Everybody’s buying new gadgets (I’ll tell you about mine later). And ,of course, we’re stocking up on those cheap items we can find in larger ports before we head off to the boonies. I just have one piece of advice. Okay, I have a lot more than that but I’ll limit myself for now.


CONFESSIONS OF A MASS MURDERER

(THE SERIAL ROACH KILLER CHRONICLES)


Glossary: ECGIER=Every Cruising Guide I Ever Read


Today’s topic is how to prevent roach infestation. As is explained in ECGIER roaches are proliferate in tropical climates. Which, by the way, is where most of us dream of cruising so here are a few helpful hints offered in ECGIER.

Tip 1: ECGIER said that roaches love to lay their eggs in the glue of cardboard boxes and canned good labels. The solution is easily apparent. Never, ever, ever, ever bring these items aboard your boat. So the easy solution is to take those four grocery cart loads full of non-perishable goods that ECGIER told you to get and push them down to the dock. Then, before stepping foot on your boat remove every non-perishable item that is stored in a cardboard box, which is about 48% of the non-perishable food that ECGIER told you to buy and place it in a non-disposable, sealable plastic container. Don’t forget to label and include cooking instructions. Next take all the canned goods which make up about 50% of the non-perishable food items ECGIER recommended you purchase and remove the labels. Don’t forget to label and include cooking instructions and expiration dates although ECGIER says expiration dates don’t really matter unless the cans start to bulge or emit noxious fumes, kind of like the cap'n. The most important thing is to get rid of the roach eggs. That’s good because by the time you complete this process the expiration date on most of your items will have passed anyway. Okay so now we’re left with 2% of the non-perishable food items that ECGIER recommended you purchase that you can transport directly onto the boat…unless they have a label or happened to touch a canned good or a cardboard box. And you never know where those things have been before they became yours. Truthfully, I skip this step and I have never, ever seen anybody sitting out on a dock doing this but every cruiser I have met swears they never bring cardboard on a boat.

Tip 2: It’s about a week later and you're finally ready to bring your provisions on board the boat. There’s just one more thing that ECGIER recommends. It seems that roaches also like to lay their eggs in the adhesive of paper bags. No problem, right? You sacked all your groceries in plastics bags. Your out of the woods except…..Doesn’t flour come in paper bags? Red alert! Red alert! Some roach eggs might have fallen into the flour. So now you need to take that fifty pounds of flour ECGIER recommended you buy and put a bay leaf in every sealed plastic non-disposable container. Then for good measure freeze if for a week. If you have a freezer.I guess if you don't have a freezer you're doomed to live among the enemy.
By now your boat should be a roach free happy environment until the next time you go to the store except……ECGIER didn’t take into account that in the tropics some of the roaches have wings. So what it if they call them Palmetto bugs. They are not cherubim and seraphim of dearly departed formerly earthbound roaches. Nope they’re real roaches and they are free to fly about your boat.

Tip 3: ECGIER has their favorite roach bait recipe (Which makes me a little suspicious that the authors may be sneaking cardboard or labeled items on to their boat). They all have the consistent ingredient of Boric acid with assorted mixers ranging from sugar and water, sweetened evaporated milk and even dog food. I’ve tried them all and it seems like the dog food works best, just make sure Fido can’t get to it. Just dump a healthy dose of Boric acid in bowl and add mixer until you have a thick paste like consistency ECGIER recommends that you make little patties out of the stuff and then let them dry out on wax paper before placing them in the places roaches like to hang out but we like to serve ours up in used rum bottle caps of which we always seem to have plenty. Overnight you should start spotting some of those good roaches. The dead ones. Just pray they haven’t laid eggs.

Tip 4: How to spot a roach egg. This is pretty simple if you look in a locker and you find spilled pepper and you don’t happen to store pepper in that locker, you have found your roach eggs. They are little black specks that look just like pepper. There may be just a few individual ones or you may find clumps of them in the corner of the locker. In the early days I didn’t really even worry about eggs. I never saw any. Of course, I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I only worried about damage control when I found the live proof of infestation. Then out would come the Boric acid and the commerical traps. I’d find a few corpses and think my job was done. Then a few weeks later I’d see these tiny little beetle like things with wiggling antennae crawling around or doing the backstroke in the dog dish. They didn’t look like roaches. In fact they were kind of cute. Kind of like how pit bull puppies are cute. Well, don’t get attached to the things because now’s the time to strike before they have time to mature enough to mate and expand their family tree. You don’t want your boat to become their ancestral home. .

Tip 5: Give ’em Da Bomb In truth, I’ve really only had one invasion and having lived aboard on and off for eleven years, most of them in the tropics, I consider myself lucky. Unfortunately, the one infestation got out of hand because I kept trying the various aforementioned remedies and each generation got a little more resistant to my various potions. I knew when I saw them doing reps with my barbells (at least someone was using them) it was time to try something else.I happened upon the bombing solution when we were leaving the boat for a period of time in the Bahamas. The local that was going to be looking after the boat while we were gone came on to familiarize himself with our systems and noticed our growing colony of unwanted “guests”. He volunteered to take care of the pests for us also. While we were gone he set off a couple explosive devices and we have not had any return visitors for many years. It probably helped that most of the food was off of the boat at the time. Or maybe our guests finally figured out that I wasn’t going to feed them any more of the delicacies I had been concocting for them and went off to find a more gracious hostess.

Tip 6: Skip Tips 1-4 and go straight to Tip 5 at the first sighting of these sneaky creatures. Show no mercy! None of this hand to hand (more like hand to mouth) combat. Go straight for da bomb. Of course, follow the manufacturer’s instructions on the deployment of all weapons in your artillery.


Tip 7: Please make sure you have no open flames on the boat when you set a bomb. The first time we were in St. Thomas there was a guy and his friend on his boat that set off a bomb and then went up on deck and were promptly blown into the wild blue yonder. One of them survived, one didn’t Apparently, the owner had left a pilot light lit on his stove.

I'm off for a good Chianti and some fava beans.

HAVE A GOOD DAY!