Night of the Spooky Spider

Un-Welcomed Aboard

Article by Jett B. Conner

Insects usually don’t unnerve me but a creepy-looking little beast once did. Several decades ago, I had a Chrysler 22 swing keel slipped at a marina near Galveston Bay in Texas. My wife Rosie and I live in Colorado (I grew up in Texas), and at the time we wanted to sail year-round, something not ordinarily done in Colorado. So, we bought the well-used sailboat and hauled it down to the Texas coast to keep in the water, figuring we could fly down every now and then to go day sailing during our off season.

One October approaching Halloween, I had time off my wife did not have. We were both educators then, but I had recently retired from college administration, and she was still teaching middle schoolers full-time for a few more years. So, I flew to Texas for several days of solo sailing and just messing about on the boat. Our little yacht was slipped at a marina in Clear Lake near League City, a prelude to the bay.

The twenty-year-old boat showed its age but still looked reasonably presentable. The original sails were surprisingly serviceable with only a couple of minor rust stains confined to the tack and clew of the mainsail. There was a very nice spinnaker setup too, but we only flew it a couple of times.

For almost a decade, our Texas sailing was mostly laid back and lazy. We liked an easy, steady breeze, days when porpoises paced us on our way to nowhere in particular out in the vast bay.

One evening during my break, I decided to crawl into the the V-berth, lean back and listen to some Miles Davis cassettes while having a glass of wine or two. I found the old player among the gear when I bought the boat. Discovering it still worked, I wired speakers on the starboard and port shelves to good effect. I still had a few jazz tapes left over from our VW bus camping days, so I brought them down to the boat. But as I was climbing up to the berth, I detected out of the corner of my eye something crawling up the side of the starboard bench. It was a black spider, a hairy looking thing. And it was headed in my direction.

Growing up in west Texas, I know tarantulas. It didn’t look like one, smaller, though later I learned the state has many varieties of this little creature. It wasn’t a black widow either, but that wasn’t particularly comforting. I had no idea what it was. However, it was menacing enough, whatever its brand. I managed to shoo it back down to the cabin sole where it immediately sprinted away toward the stern and sought refuge under the cockpit floor, out of sight.

Where was it? It knew where I was. Later in the evening, I played Davis’s Kind of Blue tape, thinking it would help me drop off. No luck. Not even Davis and John Coltrane’s extended melodious solos could put me at ease again.

It was a fitful night with little sleep. Every time I thought I felt something crawly, it jolted me awake. In the wintertime, we used to cross country ski and stay over in back-country mountain huts reserved for that purpose in the Colorado high country. Almost always, a mouse or two scurried around in the middle of the night in those off-the-grid rustic cabins. Oddly, didn’t bother me as much as the thought of this new little critter and what it might be up to.

The spider was not the only animal that had found the Chrysler’s stern appealing. Rummaging around one day while looking for something under a seat lid in the cockpit before I hauled the boat to Texas, I discovered a pile of pinecones had been squirreled away behind a bulkhead. They looked like they had been aboard for some time, lots of them, neatly packed. Having never gotten around to removing them, it dawned on me the squirrel’s cache was a perfect place for the spider’s abode.

As I was emerging from my sleeping bag the next morning, there it was looking up at me from atop the bench. Where exactly it had been all night I did not know. Did not care to know. But during the night I had plotted my moves. Quickly grabbing and folding a magazine that was ready (don’t remember if it was a Small Craft Advisor), I dispatched it.

Rosie does not like this story. She loves animals, large and small. She is very skilled at trapping and removing insects to the outside with a slip of paper and a glass, sending them on their merry way. But she was a thousand miles away.

The final nights on the boat were restless. Were there more? I still don’t know what kind of spider it was. Didn’t take time to investigate before tossing its remains overboard. But there were no more night visitors, so far as I know.

Not long after returning from my little fall adventure I accepted a temporary, full-time consulting position in higher education. Since our occasional escapes to the bay were probably over for now, we decided to sell the boat. In situ. Which was a good thing, since the trailer we put in storage in a marshy outdoor lot had basically rusted to nothing by then. Luckily, the lot’s owner allowed me to let it rest in peace right where it was left.

I confess here and now that I never told the new owners of the Chrysler about meeting up with a creepy crawly inside the cabin one night or mentioned anything about the pinecone fortress where some hairy-looking descendants might be lurking. •SCA•

---

It’s October, so time for a few spooky sailing stories! Tell us about your scary moments afloat. Was it a thick fog, an encounter with a passing ship at night, a reckless jet skier, or just a sinking feeling? Send your horror stories—fictional or not— (any length) to josh@smallcraftadvisor.com and we’ll share some of our favorites with readers. —Eds