By: Capt. Tim Ramsey
Two months ago, after having stored the boat for a few months, I hopped aboard and started prepping for fishing the next day. I opened the console hatch and noticed it looked unusually dirty with some yellowish stains and an odd aroma. No worries, I immediately cleaned it out and put my safety gear back inside. That’s when I noticed the fabric cover of my first aid kit looked strangely worn on the edges.
After that, I went to the stern and lifted the hatch under the starboard stern seat. My overly expensive blue polymer dock line looked like something had chewed on it. Weird. Then I went to the port side, opened the hatch under that stern seat, and something startled me. Next to a sizeable ball of frayed multicolor fibers, a pair of bright blue eyes stared back at me. It took me a few seconds to compute what I was seeing, then I spontaneously blurted “Mickey!” I had an uninvited guest. A mouse. Cute, but unwanted.
Before I was able to grab it or block it’s egress out of the well under the seat, it slipped through the finger hole that lets you lift the plastic bucket out of the well and disappeared. Ironically, I blurted “rats!” Silly me. I lifted the clump of fibers out of the well and something dropped on the deck. It was a baby mouse, so young its eyes were still closed. Then another. Did I have an entire mouse family in my boat? Was this a rodent nursery? How did the darn thing get in the boat? You might be thinking I stomped on the babies, but I got out of the boat and set them just inside the edge of the woods next to where the boat sat on the trailer. After all, since I’m Army retired, killing is no longer my business.
This is where I started wondering how to get rid of a rodent infestation in a boat. I inspected all the places a mouse might hide, realizing there were far more places between the hull and inner liner that a pest could live. Oh, what to do?
First, I considered giving the boat a good wash with lots of Spray 9 and boat soap in all the nooks and crannies, including inside the hull. I also removed the dock lines the mouse had chewed. Irritatingly, it preferred the expensive blue polymer ones over the plain white ones. I fished the next day and returned to the boat about three days later. Again, under the console, the same yellow stuff I identified as mouse urine, and some droppings. Now I knew the fraying on my first aid kit was from being chewed. Looking in the stern hatch, I noticed the plain white dock line showed some chew marks.
Time to up my game. I went to the garden center and bought some “balsam oil sachet’s” said to repel rodents, and some peppermint oil claimed to do the same. Long story short, they don’t work. Sure, they smell great, but one sachet set under the console was being chewed on and the peppermint oil maintained its smell better in the side door storage in the back of my truck than anywhere on or in the boat. Time to go old school.
There’s an odd feeling that comes over you when you realize you’re at the hardware store buying mousetraps for your boat. I’ve always been fastidious to the point of obsessive over the cleanliness of the boat, and I had an infestation. Did it come in through the open plug? Climb up the engine and hop in? Go down the rod holder? Squeeze through the small drain hole under the stern seat? I don’t know.
This was the plan; one trap in each stern seat well, one under the console, and one in the bilge. Peanut butter, not cheese. Fast forward, two days later I lifted the hatch under the port stern seat where I originally saw Mickey and boom, got him. Or her, I don’t know. It had unusually long hind legs which the internet said let the creature jump up to three feet off the ground. Weird.
Just in case, I put more peanut butter on the trap and put it back in the well. Two days later, I came back. I checked the two wells and the trap under the console. Nothing. Then I knelt on my Skeeter’s “non-skid from hell” covered stern deck and removed the small hatch in the engine well. There, in the bilge, was another victim.
This time, when handling the trap, it didn’t snap down twice on the spot on my hand between my thumb and index finger like it did when I tried to reach down and set it gently in the bilge, and I removed my second casualty. This mouse didn’t have long hind legs like the first. Did I have more?
Over the last two months, I haven’t seen any signs of unwanted guests. Then, last week, I opened the starboard bow hatch to discover a host of mouse droppings like Mickey was having a family reunion on my boat. I set a trap in there and waited two days. When I returned, I found the trap was tripped and had absolutely no signs of ever being baited by peanut butter. Here I go again. I think they’re in the space behind the holes for rod butts in the starboard locker.
I guess the moral of the story is getting rid of unwanted guests is always a tricky proposition, and once they’re gone, not only do you stand the chance of their return, but you never really know if they were gone at all.