Last night around midnight – two hours into my watch. Fiona was sleeping. Seas were calm and a steady breeze from the east effortlessly propelled Matilda comfortably along at about 7kts towards Brazil some 800 nautical miles to the west. The sky was clear. The Southern Cross sat low in the sky off our port beam. The occasional shooting star streaked across the sky while satellites moved along among the stars at their unwavering pace and direction. The only sound was the soothing din of Matilda gliding through the water and this goddam squeak in the rigging that I have been unable to locate.

In the middle of two continents

Out of nowhere comes this terrible shrieking. The tone was ungodly, sinful, like that which my friend attributed to his ex-wife’s voice when she said “getthefuckout” for the last time. It had to come from the depths of hell. Suddenly it became a chorus of shrieks as Matilda was encircled by half a dozen winged menaces straight out of Dante’s Inferno. The flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz had nothing on these devils. Those bastards scared the hell out of me when I was a kid and still do. Odd that it was okay to terrorize a child with that scene while a woman’s bare breasts were considered obscene. I digress.

Creepy flying monkey

So five of the Fell Beasts land on the rail at the stern of Matilda. The sixth lands on the Starlink dish, taunting. I am in the cockpit maybe seven feet from them. I yell and wave my arms. GET OUT!! GET OUT!! GET OUT!!. No response. Are they deaf? I grab the pile of line that is the genoa lazy sheet (a bundle of rope) and hurl it at the rail. It hits one of the brutes square in the chest and she (I assume they are female) tumbles into the sea. The others are unfazed – like nothing happened. I hurl the line again and this time take out two of the unholy fowl. All the rest, except the one on the Starlink dish, take off. Moments later they are circling and shrieking again. All of them. Even the ones I knocked off. Dive bombing right at me. Dropping shit bombs that luckily missed the target. At this point I am thinking exactly what you are thinking – Suzanne Pleshette running through Bodega Bay getting pecked to death in Hitchcock’s “The Birds”. Maybe I should lock myself below and have Fiona go up and try her luck. Uh, maybe not.

The Sheerwater – our tormenter

Great Shearwaters are ocean nomads, journeying thousands of miles each year from remote South Atlantic breeding grounds to cool North Atlantic waters in the boreal summer (their nonbreeding season). They fly low over the ocean on stiff, straight wings, but arc higher and wheel steeply in strong winds.

Not to confuse fear and desperation with bravery, I went on deck and grabbed the boat hook. A boat hook is an aluminum pole about twice the length of a baseball bat with a hook on the end to retrieve things in the water from the deck of the boat. I think that’s about 1.86 times the length of a cricket bat but I’m not very good at metric conversion. Anyway, I’m standing on the aft deck with one hand holding on to the backstay so as not to fall overboard and the other swinging the boat hook wildly at satan’s flying killing machines. 

There is a wonderful feeling when you hit a ball with a bat or a golf club right on the sweet spot. A resonant “pop” that transfers all that energy into one small target. It is the same feeling when a boat hook hits a bird in the head – “pop” – and the bird drops out of the sky. I took two of them out this way. A third caught his wing right at the shoulder in the boat hook. I damn near twisted the wing right off before it broke loose and she dropped into the sea. That was it. They retreated in defeat, except for the one on the Starlink dish. A gentle nudge and she was gone. We haven’t seen or heard from them since.