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orms happen on boats. They show up in galleys, usually as unwelcome hitchhikers in the food supply. But one cruising family is intentionally carrying a healthy supply of the bugs on board. And crickets, too. They are part of the care and feeding of special crew on “Osprey”, a 45-foot Adams steel sailboat.

Kaeo with Bandy, a gecko who likes worms and crickets

“Osprey” stopped in at Oriental in November with the Clarke family, Wendy and Johnny, their son 11-year old son, Kaeo and 8-year old daughter, Kailani, (who is more often called, Bird.) Also on board were Kaeo’s gecko lizard, Bandy, and Bird’s hermit crabs.

All were on their way to the Bahamas, but for the beginning of that trip, much attention was paid to Bandy’s comfort — and life support. Geckos do well in warm places such as the islands where the Clarkes were headed. But it would be more be than a few miles and more than a few days in cool weather before they got there, so special measures were called for.

SV “Osprey”

For instance, while “Osprey” was in Oriental, a hot lamp ran constantly in Bandy’s small terrarium. Johnny Clarke said that much of the juice coming from “Osprey’s” wind generator and solar panels went toward keeping Bandy warm (and alive) til they got to warmer climes. Kaeo’s enthusiasm for reptiles far outpaces his father’s; Johnny figures Bandy is “the most expensive gecko in the world.”

Judging by her wide tail — something Kaeo pointed out — Bandy was happy and well fed. But that took some work as geckos have a particular diet. “All the bugs you do not want,” Wendy Clarke says, “we need to have in a controlled manner”.

Geckos eat live crickets. (Four or five every three days, says Kaeo.) They’d bought a bunch of them in Norfolk and they were not the non-chirping kind. Since then, Wendy said, the boat was full of chirps at night.

Anticipating that there may be a time when live crickets were not available, what’s a mother to do to keep her son’s beloved pet fat and happy and, most importantly, alive? Wendy’s tried a number of things.

A hot lamp for Bandy, the gecko.

“I have freeze dried crickets, in case we get in a real bind,” she said.

Before leaving Annapolis, she experimented even further: “I’ve even gone so far as to buy canned dead crickets and tie a tiny piece of thread to their leg to make them look like they’re moving.” (Apparently, it ain’t the cricket, it’s the motion that geckos want to see in their prey.) Bandy “won’t go for it if it’s just dead in the dish, so you’ve got to make her think it’s alive,” Wendy said.

“You sit there and you twitch it a little.”

If Bandy caught on to the not-really-live crickets, Wendy had an alternative cuisine lined up. Bandy, she said, “can live for several months on meal worms.” Also, wax worms. Containers of both were tucked in to “Osprey’s” refrigerator .

The well-stocked galley refrigerator and meals fit for a gecko

While these extraordinary measures were taken while cruising down the East Coast in the late fall, Wendy says she put her kids on notice that “when we get to the islands, their job is going to be to dig up mealworms and crickets and cockroaches.”

Bird (Kailani) plays with some inanimate pets

Getting to the islands — if not the bugs there — has been the goal for the Clarke family for the past few years. Wendy has been chronicling those preparations and travails on the back page of Cruising World magazine since 2007.

Reporting back to Cruising World, Wendy takes in coffee and wifi at The Bean.

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Wendy Mitman Clarke got the job a few years ago after opening Cruising World to find that the couple — Bernadette and Douglas Bernon — had stopped cruising and so, weren’t writing their back page column anymore. At the time, Wendy was executive editor of Chesapeake Bay Magazine (and before that wrote a column for Soundings) and she and Johnny had just bought “Osprey” with plans of going cruising. She made a call to Cruising World and pitched the idea of writing a column about sailing with children, the preparation as well as the actual cruising itself.

A well-placed pinata near Bird’s and Kaeo’s bunks. “His name is Sharkie,” Bird says, “and he eats Kleenex”.

A year later, she was in Oriental, heading south on that trip. We met her at The Bean one morning as she was looking for, among other things, an Internet connection to send her next column to the magazine. (The piece, which appeared in the March issue, was about being plugged in to the Internet while otherwise unplugging from land life.)

Wendy and Johnny

The Internet is how they found the boat in the first place. They wanted a boat they could live on as a family. At the same time, both she and Johnny had raced sailboats and wanted something that, as she put it, wasn’t a “turd on lard.” After a week of searching on line, she hit upon the listing for this Australian-built steel boat. “I looked at it and I went, ‘Wow, that’s pretty. I like the lines.’ Then I went, ‘Oh God, it’s steel.’” They got over that after seeing the boat that afternoon, which they were able to do because it was in Back Creek, an area of Annapolis, not far from the Eastport boat yard that Johnny owned. They brought the boat there to work on for the better part of two years.

The salon on “Osprey” and a spider, one of the many toy animals on board.

Just about everything on board, except the mast and hull, was replaced. It was laborious. Bird puts a finer point on it: “It was miserable.” Moisture and steel boats don’t mix well and water had gotten inside the hull. When they took hardware off, they found a mess where the wood met the steel. Sprayed-in foam made the job even harder. Chisels had to be employed just to get to the fasteners.

They also had to paint the boat’s exterior … twice. The first time went well enough, they say. Tape was removed, the boat was looking great. Then, in the same shed at Johnny’s boatyard, another boat was painted a dark color. And so was theirs. The family spent a dispiriting weekend preparing “Osprey” for a repair paint job. Everything had to be taped up again. The kids were put to work. It was a low point. There was talk of just leaving it behind.

Bird and a painting that didn’t require taping

But they got it done. They gave the boat a new name, choosing “Osprey” because the birds, “kind of mark the seasons for us. They always return to Annapolis right around St. Patty’s Day. We’ve had a nest near our house and we’ve named the adults King and Queen.”

For Johnny, the connection is even older. “When I was growing up on the Bay, there were no ospreys.” DDT had taken its toll and sightings were very rare, he said. “If you saw a bald eagle, it was ‘Wow, we saw a bald eagle.’ But you saw an osprey and it made your whole summer.”

Things have obviously progressed, he says, and now “we have them everywhere. The kids took to them, also. They do mark our season. When the osprey come back, it’s time to go sailing.”

In the fall of 2008, like the bird it’s named for, “Osprey” went south, too. But the boat and its crew had a less certain destination than the birds.

Where exactly were they headed? Wendy laughs at the question, which she has been asked so often that she says she gets almost metaphysical about it. She says she started answering it with another question: “Do you know where you’re going?” (It was the subject of one of her CW columns.) Her kids are more specific about where they’d like to go — the list includes places with unusual wildlife. Bird wants to see Antartica, Madagascar, New Zealand. Kaeo has his eye on the Galapagos and Australia (not coincidentally the home of the late Steve Riley. The death of the fellow reptile-phile, Kaeo says, made him cry for two hours.)

Osprey departs Oriental

Wendy, meanwhile, says “I just want to get to the next spot. I have no expectations.”

For the time being, the crew of “Osprey” were bound for the Bahamas — and once they “make sure everyone’s happy and doing well,” Wendy said, we’ll continue south to the BVI.” After that, will come more decisions of whether to proceed to Grenada or Trinidad for hurricane season.

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Since leaving Oriental in November, “Osprey” has found her way to the Exumas. The weather is warmer, indeed, though Bird was inspired to write the following poem about a cold frog.

Reports are that part of the crew would like to settle in Oriental and increase the gecko population by at least one.

Posted Thursday April 2, 2009 by Melinda Penkava

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