Sabbatical III continues to be extremely popular with the boobies despite vigorous efforts to dissuade them from roosting and pooping on the boat. We cannot sit out at night and watch the stars for fear of falling guano coming from the birds that sit up in the mast speaders (cross trees). In addition, they wake us up early in the morning with their chatter and squabbles over turf. There is a beautiful island where no one bothers them just a 100 meters away, so why do they insist on sitting on our rails, spreaders, anchor snubber, and other parts of the boat? I have a theory.
The boobies get tired of having sand always clinging to their big, blue webbed feet and their legs. When sand sticks to you, it just gets annoying after awhile. There are only a couple of protruding rocks on the shore, and those rocks are filled with boobies sitting 10 abreast or more. There is never room for even one more booby on the rocks. However, the rocks are filled with booby “dung”, and I presume that the advantage of having no sticky sand on the rocks is offset by both the crowed conditions and by having to stand in the droppings of the one million boobies that stood on the rock before you did. So what’s a booby to do if he/she wants to keep their blue feet clean and dry for even a little while?
From the perspective of the booby, Sabbatical III is the ideal roosting station. She has a steel rail all the way around her, and she has flat mast spreaders 35 feet and 50 feet above the deck if the rails get crowded. Best of all from the booby perspective, there is no sand to stick to your blue webbed feet, and if you need to crap, a need which boobies seem to feel every 10 minutes, all your droppings fall to the deck so the rail stays nice a clean. Sabbatical III is the perfect “Pitt toilet” if you will. So what if the human inhabitant shout and wave their arms, hang CD’s from strings, put scary shapes on the halyards, no harm seems to come to the boobies and the human wash the deck clean every day. And there is none of that bird guano odor that permeates the rocky outcroppings of the island.
So the first boobies to alight and crap on Sabbatical III have told their friends and now Sabbatical III is the most popular meeting place within a hundred miles. The preferred location is the bow pulpit where boobies can act out “Titanic”, hanging on tightly with their blue webbed feet, while lifting a wing to get some fresh air through their “armpit”. If the bow is full, boobies either knock off a current inhabitant, or go up in a spreader where they get a good view of their droppings falling 50 feet to the deck. I am not sure how they will entertain themselves once we are gone.
M.
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