Travel with Indigo

The long trip from Trinidad to Paramaribo, Suriname was largely uneventful except for an odd event that took place one evening at sundown. The sea was wonderfully calm, the sun was setting, and I was comfortably seated on the upper deck reading a book. The coastal plains of Suriname, some 25 miles to the west, was far out of sight. All was calm until I began to notice that insects were flitting about, and among these were a large number of dragon flies. Now it’s not so unusual to see dragon flies in your backyard, but here, 25 miles out to sea, it was startling. In a short time, the number of the things increased rapidly until very soon they were swarming all over the boat, thousands of them. Recalling the Hitchcock movie, The Birds, I went inside only to watch through the aft salon door as gazillions of these bugs swarmed in a dense fog, clinging to ceiling, deck and furniture and darkening the air in between. Next morning they all lay dead, covering the deck in bug carcasses. Weird!