Last night we found four little black flying bugs in our room. They looked like they were small enough to get through the screen. Argh. This explains why we have been getting bitten when we have been so careful to use the bug spray when we go out. We have some noseeum netting aboard, which is finer meshed screen, so Eric put that on all the windows we like to leave open.

This morning was an even more upsetting bug situation. One of the basic rules of cruising life is never, ever bring cardboard on your boat. You are supposed to take everything out of the cardboard before you get in the dinghy and leave the box on shore. We aren’t so good about that. We’ll bring the cardboard in the dinghy and put it in the cockpit, though we never bring it inside. A second basic rule is to wash all your produce in the cockpit prior to bringing it inside. We are generally good at following that rule, though often if we get in late, the produce will sit outside overnight and get washed the next day. We find lots of critters that live in the dirt on the produce, but have never found any bugs that could survive out of the dirt. There was one time on Tahaa where we found beetles on board that could have possibly come from some fruit we got and had left in the cockpit, but there are several other places they could have come from, as well, and we never actually saw any beetles on the fruit.

Last night it was dark when we got in, so we left the cardboard box with the fruit sitting in the cockpit under the vent. When Christi went to wash the fruit, 7 or 8 cockroaches of assorted sizes came floating to the surface. Omigod. She killed all the bugs and scrubbed the fruit. We tossed the box overboard, noticing another one in there. The roaches could have come from the box or the fruit or both. It didn’t matter. What mattered was they had all night to run around the boat and find new homes on board. Christi went on the boric acid rampage, putting it out everywhere outside a roach could potentially hide. Special attention was paid to all vents, where she did the exterior and interior, along with areas near the interior vents that could be good hiding spots. We are praying to God that we didn’t just give ourselves a roach problem by being lackadaisical.

Roach trauma behind us, we went to shore to get lunch and go on the internet hunt. As we were looking for a restaurant, we found an internet café. The connection was painfully slow, just as bad as in the majority of places we visited in the South Pacific. We tried to upload the first blog update. After an hour, we gave up, realizing there simply wasn’t enough bandwidth here for us to post. In the South Pacific, that same futile hour would have cost us a few dollars. Here in Indonesia, 60 cents. That took away some of the frustration at not being able to upload.

We headed back to Kosmos. We have had a small crack in the lip of the dinghy for a while now that has been getting progressively bigger, and the day we left Kupang it had gotten much worse. Eric repaired it while Christi did some cleaning and preparing to get ready to go tomorrow.

As we were getting ready for bed, we noticed the swells had really picked up a lot. We wouldn’t call Ende a calm anchorage, but it hadn’t been rolly enough to put out the paravanes. Should we? There was no wind so likely the swells were a fluke and would die down soon, so we didn’t. That was a mistake. The swells got bigger and more frequent through the night. They were hitting us on the beam (side), and we felt like we were at sea in the South Pacific.

After a restless sleep, we were up early and left immediately. Our original plan was to leave three hours later, but we decided going slower and spending three more hours at sea was preferable to getting sea sick at anchor from the uncomfortable rolling. It was much better once the stabilizers were on and we were heading into the swells. As we were getting ready to go, we found a crab outside. Right after leaving, we found a spider inside. Where did all these bugs come from???