Hitchhikers

by Paula
Herrington Harbour Marina, Tracy's Landing, Maryland

No creepy guy rowed up to our boat in the middle of the ocean (a la the film Dead Calm), but we did have a few hitchhikers join us for brief periods while underway.

This pelican settled comfortably on our mizzen-boom while we were coming down the ICW in January of 2014 and stayed for a while, enjoying the ride.

We were delighted with a lovely performance by this bird who perched high atop our mainmast spreader and sang all morning while we were in the Frederika River in Georgia.

Our memory is a bit foggy on this one, but we know this little shrimp appeared somewhere he was not supposed to be way back in April of 2014 while we were in Dinner Key in Miami.

In November of 2014 we crossed the Mona Passage from Luperón in the Dominican Republic to Boquerón in Puerto Rico. Leaving in late the afternoon we traveled a day and a half, to arrive just after the sunrise. This seabird settled in to spend a few hours sleeping on our rail-mounted spare outboard engine.

The appearance of flying fish on our deck was a common occurrence. They often encountered our boat in their above-water flight to escape a predator. Had we found them a bit sooner, Greg would have sautéed them with his eggs for breakfast.

We had an actual human hitch a ride on our passage from Saba to St. Martin. We met Zsuzsa when she was on board a pretty little ketch s/v Segue, moored nearby in Saba's wide open anchorage. She had met the  Segue guys in St. Barths, and they invited her to join them for a week on Saba. She had planned to hop on a local plane to St. Martin where she was meeting other friends, but we were heading that way and welcomed her aboard Daystar. It was fun to have her along with us on our lovely beam reach that day.

At first we blamed the arrival of Greg's brother, Brett, for the appearance of this scorpion near our galley, as he had just arrived from Austin. Turns out that this little guy hitched a ride on a goat skull we brought home as a souvenir from our hike on Ilet de Cabrit in Les Saintes, Guadeloupe.

It was early morning in June of 2016 when I was on the helm, making the three-day passage from Puerto Rico to Great Inagua in the Bahamas. This gorgeous Tropicbird tried four times to land on Daystar. I peered out from the below the bimini to look for her circling aft again, but she was nowhere to be seen in the sky. Looking forward again, there she was in the cockpit! Without the room for her wings to spread, she could not manage fly out, so we gave her a little assistance.

This butterfly was keen to camouflage herself, first landing on the yellow lettering on our mainsail cradle-cover and then on this bright yellow line.

Back in the Intracoastal Waterway, heading north this time, a North Carolina dragonfly hitched a brief ride on our mainmast halyard.

This tadpole-looking critter appeared on the foredeck as we hauled anchor on our very last day in the Chesapeake Bay. Despite his fluttering and flapping, we were able to scoop him up and throw him back in.