Night Terrors!

Yesterday morning we woke up to find we had been attacked by midges overnight.  If you don't know - we had never heard of them - midges are about the size of mosquitoes.  They swarm in the thousands but they don't bite which is the only good thing about them.  In spite of the breeze during the night the boat was covered, and I mean covered!  Midges on the screens, on the cockpit floor, on the sail cover, under the sail cover, in the boom.   They were about an inch deep on the swim step at the back of the boat.   Midges eat (some insects don't).  We know this because the boat was covered with thousands of little midge droppings.  Midges are rather delicate, in that when you try to brush them off things they disintegrate into a brown smear.  Are you starting to get an image here?

 

 

Trust me, these pictures no way show how bad the bug carnage was!
This was after some cleaning when Sue thought it was OK to open the
screen enough to poke the camera out.
Notice I'm standing on the seat so I don't crush quite as many bugs into the non-skid.

 

Sue spent the first two hours underway filling a bucket with our wash down pump and sloshing the worst of the bugs away.  They she used a brush and a sponge to clean up the smears and droppings.  She would think she had an area done only to find more that had fallen out of the sail cover or that had been behind the dodger.  I took over for a while, trying to them them out from under the dodger, shaking the boom and sail cover, shaking coiled lines, and checking under any thing where they might be hiding.  In all we spent almost 5 hours getting rid of 90 or 95 per cent of them.  At some point we will need to remove the dodger, all the lines, anything else on deck and thoroughly scrub the dead bugs and bug droppings.  Last night we had to use the shop vac to get more of them off the ceilings down below.  What a thoroughly disgusting experience!!

 

We ended up in Great Bridge, VA which is about 12 miles from the Mile 0 of the ICW in downtown Norfolk.  The marina where we stopped on the way south doesn't have an available dock so we will try to find some place else to stop.  After we finish in this area we will be going up the Chesapeake Bay.  We're not really sure how much time we will spending exploring there.  I think we saw some of the must see spots on the way down, and if the weather gets hot again I know we're not doing to waste much time heading north.