No No-See-Ums

We made a stop in Matanchen Bay with the main goal of going on a jungle tour up the Rio Tovaro. This area was legendary for No-See-Um activity, and this was enough for me to protest a bit about even going here, given my previous experience with No-See-Ums. However, Lady Carolina had done the tour the previous season, so they gave us a full briefing on how we needed to do it in order to minimize the damage done to our bodies by the no-see-ums.  Here was the drill:

#1) Anchor as far out in the bay as possible in hopes that the no-see-ums don’t find you.  The funny thing is that in this area of the coast it shallows very gradually, and we were in 40 ft of water when we were still 2 miles out.  But we did anchor pretty far out, and the good thing (for us) was there was already one other boat there so we anchored on the outside of them a ways, so that they could be the sacrificial boat.  (This boat turned out to be s/v Moments, a fun, young couple that we ended up meeting later on in La Cruz).  Lady Carolina and True Blue anchored outside of us.

#2) Close up the boat.  We closed all hatches, portals, and our sliding salon door before dropping anchor.  We suffered in the sauna, but this was better than being eaten alive.

#3) Dress to protect yourself for the morning beach landing.  This includes long sleeves, pants, and socks, and tuck your pants into your socks.  OK, we didn’t quite follow this advice.  First of all, Alex doesn’t even have any pants that fit him except the jeans we bought for Danna’s wedding.  Second, I knew it would be a wet beach surf landing, and I didn’t see any reason to get our socks and pants all wet, as long as we got off the beach quickly.  Tim, Brenden, and I wore pants that we could roll up for the landing, and then we high-tailed off the beach as quickly as we could.  Tim had to linger a bit longer to arrange to leave our dinghy in front of one of the palapas, but he escaped the beach with minimal damage.

#4) Be back to the beach well before dusk, since bug activity is the worst around dawn and dusk.  We were able to manage this easily even packing in a full day of jungle tour, bus ride to San Blas, exploring a bit of San Blas, and then taxi ride back.

#5) Do not pay the palapa who watched your dinghy by staying and eating at the restaurant, since it is imperative to get off the beach before dusk.  Pay them cash, and get out of there.  Check.

#6) When you are back at the boat, jump into the water fully clothed to kill any no-see-ums who have attached themselves to you and/or your clothing.  OK, here we deviated a bit as well.  We simply undressed on the swim step and bagged up our clothes and sealed it tight, then we jumped in and rinsed ourselves off (except for me, I went straight to the showere and rinsed off there.)  We left the clothes bagged until we got to our next laundry opportunity.

So, all of this worked pretty well, and if we had any no-see-um bites at all, it was in the single digits, and manageble.  As we were leaving the bay the next morning, True Blue radioed to let us know that they discovered tons of no-see-ums under their cockpit cushions, so although they didn’t penetrate into the cabins, they definitely found the boats and started setting up shop in their cockpit.  Their cushions are dark colored, which apparently the bugs preferred.  So, we did an inspection of our own cockpit, and they were in or under our cushions, maybe since they are lighter colored, but there was some dive gear on the floor of the cockpit under which we had our own little infestation.  Thankfully we got the heads up from True Blue and we were able to exterminate the little devils before they started chomping on us.