Day 16: Unwanted visitors
A blind passenger indeed, we spotted yesterday on the curtain in the saloon. It was a green tree bug, Nezara viridula. „Where is it coming from?“ we have been wondering and considering whether it might have been on board all way long or whether it might have been capable to fly all the way out from land. Tree bugs are great flyers, but it would have meant to fly at least 75 nm from Yemen or 100 nm from Somalia.
I was astonished even more, in the evening, after dinner. It was dark already and I was in the cockpit looking around and checking the sails. Finally, there has been sufficient wind to go sailing. At the same time, we had no swells and Moya was making 5 knots without any rolling. It was real fun! The condition were stable enough to go during the night with poled out genoa and spinnaker for once. This sail configuration is limiting our navigation capabilities as we are only able to go dead downwind. But the wind angle was suitable for sailing within the narrow middle line, we just needed to check course and sails more often.
so, I have been out in the cockpit checking, when I heard loud rhythmic noises. It sounded almost like whistling, or bird noices. „No, it is chirping“ I noticed after a moment amazed and called for Joshi and Joni „We have a cricket on board“. With a torch we started to look for the disturbance. My ears were ringing. I absolutely had no clue, that little male insects are capable to produce such loud noises with their wings. We found it fast, as the cricket just sat next to me. It wasn’t that small. For an insect, I considered it even quite large and brown. As I hadn’t been aware of seeing a cricket before, I couldn’t be sure that that’s one indeed, but the picture in wikipedia left no other conclusion. Most of their species are not even flying. How likely is it, that Moya carried the intruder for 15 days without chirping? It’s quite impossible to miss hearing it.
In the morning just before the daily radio chat with the japanese aircraft, we pulled in our spi. Winds have been increasing and became too strong for our light wind sail. We hoisted our main and celebrated that we finally escaped the calm. The sea has white spots of spray and Moya is rolling again.
