The Bird attack
I was sailing from Nuku Hiva towards
Fiji and evening had produced a beautiful sunset.
Sunrises and sunsets are two of the most beautiful time of day and only one other phenomenon competes and that's on a moonless night with the stars unaffected by light pollution sparkling to make magic.
On the boat I have a sun cover that I use to protect me from the sun when Im on the open seas and it works ok and this forms part of my story today
Well when sailing thousands of miles from the nearest land I often get hitch hikers in the form of very tired birds and I'm very tolerant of them so long as they stay away from the wind generator blades and my solar panels but I mostly know that's asking a bit much especially the solar panels being that they are flat surfaces that birds can land on and they aren't quite as rocky as the lifelines.
Sometimes because I am usually quite tolerant I carry the ones that are so tired to the front of the boat and place then on the door of the chain locker and let them sleep there or if they are on the lifelines just leave them there for however long they want to rest.
Well on said night I was 1100 miles from Nuku Hiva and it had just got dark and the black bird clearly exhausted landed on the top solar panels ready to hitch a ride for the night and get a good sleep
I wasn't having any of it and shouted at it to go and land on the Bow and rest there but it was not interested in my ranting and just looked and me speaking non bird language and thought what a stupid being telling it what to do. Anyway after a while of me giving instructions in vain I got up and went aft and tried to wave it off and make it fly off. It ignored me again so it slapped it in the face and then on the second slap it flew off
Well now it was cleverer that I expected and when I got into the cockpit it came back and landed on my main genoa winch and sat there looking at me as though telling me what an evil person I was for chasing it away and now it was thinking of sharing my private space for the night. I wasn't too worried about it being there because it was on the opposite side of the cockpit and was rocking with the sway of the boat.
Well then the horrible not so little bastard turned around and I realised it had been sitting there for as long as it took to build up the right pressure and it lifted its tail and out shot the biggest bird shit it could have projected. It was like when as teenagers we boys would stand on one side of the pool and compete who could pee all the way across. The projectile hit my chest and spread out in an array of colour then ran downward. I got such a shock I was frozen and did not react for quite a long time before the mad tirade of profanities emitted from my mouth and I rushed it to get it but it saw me coming and was gone.
Then while I was cleaning up and changing shirts it flew back to the top panels and sat there again and turned again and proceeded to fire round after round at me and except for my cover I would have been covered from head to toe in its vengeance.
You can see where i was sitting
Needless to say the next morning the solar panels were thickly covered in excretment or BIRDSHIT and I had to climb up and scrub them to get the sun to do its work and that was rough because the boat was rolling badly from rough seas
That bastard bird has ruined it for all future feathered hitch-hikers on my boat.
Until next time
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