March 24, 2024
During the night, something touched my arm. “It must be a moth or a flying termite thing?” I thought. Back to sleep. Then I heard dishes rattling. “Must be something settling?” I thought. Back to sleep. Then more rattling. Nope. Something’s up. And it’s 2AM, naturally!
Thinking a bird had flown into the cabin, I grabbed the flashlight and cautiously crept toward the galley. I wasn’t prepared for what I found! Here’s a quick video for more slithery goodness…
In some of the images, it looks like there were two snakes. Nope, just one really long one curled around several times. I used the above photo as a reference to measure the length of this Amethystine Python and it came out to 10.9 feet or 3.3 meters. It was as big around as my wrist at its widest.
Cyndi is sleeping right now. She’s not going to be happy when she wakes up and sees this blog post as we were both hoping that we’d find it was just a bad, mutually shared dream.
Why does all the bad stuff happen at 2 AM?! The other day we heard a “knock, knock, knock” at 2 AM. It was the Ternate harbor pilot telling us we had to pull anchor and move further away from the big ship wharf. We came over here to Halmahara for peace and quiet. Look how that worked out!
We used a 2 meter long piece of angle aluminum to gently lift parts of Snakey McSnakeface and persuade it to move into the cockpit, then overboard, into the water. He swam away looking perturbed. (Not nearly as perturbed as we were!) It took us hours to get back to sleep.
We sealed all the hatches despite the warmth. I’d rather face a bit of stuffiness from limited airflow than risk compression asphyxia from an encounter with this snake’s even larger sibling. (Truthfully, this snake could probably do the job just fine and let his big brother sleep in.)
By the way, the music on this video is AI generated by Suno.ai. I can’t stop singing the song!
-Rich
