ONE OF THE ASPECTS of sailing that has always fascinated me is the wide range of disciplines involved. Sailing as a sport touches on so many other facets of social and scientific life that its almost impossible to list them all.
Perhaps thats why sailing has always fit in with my former calling as a newspaperman. Competent journalists must know at least a little about a very wide range of subjects, and a whole lot about at least a few. The same goes for amateur sailors.
And now its that time of year again when we have to remember how to thwart mice intent on turning rubber dinghies into Swiss cheese.
New Englander Carl Thunberg wrote an impassioned plea on the Cape Dory bulletin board. He said he owned a Cape Dory 30 called Leona Pearl. Our very expensive 11-foot rigid inflatable boat is riddled with mouse holes, he said. Does anyone know of a reputable business that repairs holes in inflatable dinghies within a reasonable driving distance of Portsmouth, New Hampshire?
And how do mice come to eat holes in a rubber dinghy, you ask? Well, many sailors in the Northeast haul their boats out of the water for winter. They deflate their dinghies and store them in garages or barns.
This doesnt exactly explain why mice would want to chomp holes in them, but believe me, they do. Exactly the same thing happened to Carls previous rubber dinghy.
Perhaps Carls mice have discovered a new form of winter entertainment, sort of like a spooky fairground haunted house, in which you eat a hole through a layer of rubber dinghy, squeeze through, and run around inside the pitch-dark chamber until you have scared yourself out of your little mouses wits, and then you quickly eat your way out again.
Perhaps they have developed a genuine epicurean liking for salted inflatable-dinghy fabric, or maybe the dumb critters are hoping that by creating the holes the boat will magically turn into a giant Swiss cheese.
In any case, Carls experience is not unique. Other Cape Dory owners offered suggestions from their own experience, the main one of which is to strew the dinghy liberally with a fragrant fabric softener known as Bounce. Rubber dinghies that have been Bounced seem to be immune to rodent chomps.
There are other methods to protect stored rubber dinghies, of course, including barn cats, mouse-proof steel boxes, and, failing all else, the use of hard dinghies instead of rubber ones. But nothing is as cheap and easy as Bounce.
I must make a note of it. I wonder if it works on seagulls?
Todays Thought
Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal it is which never entrusts his life to one hole only.
Plautus, Truculentus
Tailpiece
The problem with the person who has an hour to kill is that he inevitably wants to spend it with someone who hasnt a minute to spare.
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