Flies

I thought I had endured about the worst that fly season can throw at a sailor; when we sailed back on the Great lakes when fly season arrives, the big lakes come alive with the hungry critters. They can literally drive you crazy as they attempt to get a chunk of your hide, but they are only the size of regular house flies. Here in South Carolina, they have horse flies that come out during the heat of the day and swarm your boat as you motor along at 5 kts. They are the size of honey bees and sound about the same. All day long, I drove the boat through the "low country" and at one point almost drove us into a mud bank on the side of the channel in my frenzy to kill them. By the end of the day, our cockpit was littered with their bodies and my wrist was sore from swatting them. I even broke my favorite fly swatter we had nicknamed “death”! A friend suggested we should sew up screens for the cockpit before we left Florida and now I wish I had taken her advice.