Don't read on if you hate stories about little grubby things...
Last Friday night I pitched my tent on a little hillocky thing at the
foot of Rossett Gill near Langdale, in preparation for a trog up
towards Borrowdale on Saturday. It was a lovely evening, and there
wasn't any rain. The ground was very boggy, but my groundsheet is
intact so I wasn't worried.
I unpacked into the tent, laid out my rucksack, flask and water bottle
in the porch and began to inflate my 2 mattresses, and to get the
sleepy bag out of its sack. Not long after that I turned back to the
porch, and made a Kettley Thing full of hot choccolate, which I drank.
Some time after that I picked up my water bottle and flask and noticed
that there seemed to be something swarming over both of them... when I
looked closer it turned out that there were hundreds of very tiny,
thread-like wormy things all over the metal. They were moving around;
wriggling. I had to exercise a lot of very fast self restraint to keep
from running shrieking out of the tent and leaving all my kit behind,
because if there's something that really gives me the absolute creeps
it's little wormy things. (I don't mind earthworms, slugs, snails etc,
but parasitic worms? Please don your earphones while I scream...)
I put the flask and bottle down on the grass, quickly, and after a
minute or so I tried to wipe off the wormy things with some of my loo
roll. They turned out to be surprisingly robust and sticky, though,
and I was afraid of wiping them onto my fingers, so it was a tricky
process. My rubbing seemed to be clogging them up into little clumps
around the entrance to the cup of my flask, and the stopper on my Sigg
:-( It then occurred to me that there might have been some on the
bottom of the gas cannister that I'd put back into a corner of the
tent, and (horror of horrors...) on my Kettley Thing. Investigations
proved both of these to be correct...
In the end I spent about 30 minutes wiping and re-wiping the gas
cannister, and I left the flask, W. bottle and Kettley Thing in the
porch to be dealt with in the morning. I didn't sleep very well,
partly because of my mattress problem but mainly because each time I
closed my eyes I saw little thread-like wormy things swarming towards
me from the porch...
In the morning it took me a couple of hours to psych myself up to pack
up the tent, as I could hardly bear to turn it over and look under the
groundsheet. I did in the end, though, and sure enough there were
thousands of little wriggling thread-like things. I took my flask,
bottle and Kettley Thing to a stream and did my best to wipe them
clean. Once I'd packed up I almost walked back to the car and drove
home to wash my kit properly and get a shower, but I didn't because I
was afraid I'd never want to get out in the tent again. In the end I
had a fabulous Saturday, so I'm glad I didn't wimp out.
What I'm wondering now, though, is what these icky little wormy things
are likely to have been. Does anyone know? I made sure not to camp in
a boggy bit on Saturday night, and I didn't see any more of the
terrifying creatures. I'd noticed earlier on Friday, though, that my
hands felt vaguely slimey after I'd leaned on some grass/moss, and
afterwards I wondered whether these things were all over teh grass in
the valley.
Could they have been mosquito larvae or something? I'd like to think
so, as then I could shift them out of the 'worm' category in my mind.
Having said that, though, they didn't look like what I've always
thought of as mosquito larvae in water butts.
Any ideas? It really was a horrible experience. They're still all over
the bottom of my groundsheet....
<fx: shudder...>
Best wishes,
--
,,
(**)PeeWiglet~~
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