April, 2012  Gecko Tale

My wish list on Amazon has included a gecko from the beginning.  They are small, cute, quiet and eat bugs.  Sounds like the perfect pet for a boat heading for the tropics.  I can’t have a cat or a dog or even a bird but a gecko would be perfect, a pair would be even better.  Unfortunately, no one gave me a gecko as a good-bye gift.  Audrey managed to find a hedgehog for Nick, but no gecko for me. 

So off we set, geckoless.  Each new place that we stopped, I would check for geckos, on the walls, on the rocks.  No luck.  Lots of iguanas but no geckos.  Then 6 months later in La Cruz, at  a little street restaurant called Twins I spotted a gecko on the wall.    I am sure they thought I was crazy but I managed to convince the owners that I really wanted to have one.  They said that they had lots of them in their house and would bring me several the next night if they could catch them.  

The next evening back at the restaurant, they had managed to capture one, a lovely pale orange color about 6 inches long!   Dinner was filled with discussions of what to name it.  Was it a male or female?  The restaurant owner announced that it was female, based on what I have no idea.  I finally settled on Margarita Isabel, a name longer that she was.  Izzy for short, or possibly Maggie.   After dinner we set off back to the boat in the dingy with Izzy safely in a plastic cup with holes in the lid.  Back on board, I carefully took the lid off and in a flash she was gone.  Disappeared somewhere into the nooks and crannies.  Boy, they are fast!

Now that I actually had a gecko on board I started to worry.  Would she live?  Would she find enough to eat?  I wanted her to catch bugs but the truth is, we don’t have many bugs aboard except for fruit flies once in a while.  An internet search was not much help.  Most sites said to let them go but I could not do that since I had no idea where she was.  Would she get squished by things shifting as we sailed?  They say geckos chatter at night but I never heard her.  Was she still there?  Maybe she needed a friend to talk to.  Maybe she was lonely.  A week later I went home to the States for a visit with no idea whether she was alive or dead.  A week later Alan also headed home to the States, leaving the boat all closed up.

I got back to Rhapsody first, several days before Alan.  One quiet evening all of a sudden there was Maggie sitting on the bathroom counter.  Gone with a flick of the tail but alive and apparently happy.   I saw her a couple of times after that, always in the bathroom.  Coming back from dinner one evening, There was a baby gecko on the dock, only an inch long.  I caught it and let it loose on the boat.  I  have not seen it since either and I still do not head any chattering at night but I am hoping they will find each other and be friends.  If one is a male and one a female we may have baby geckos some day.  Meanwhile, I am always looking for another one, just in case.