Water Boatman

For the past week or so I've noticed a tenant in our pool. It's a lone water boatman, which I usually find in the southeastern corner (shallow end) of the pool. It lurks near the bottom, and when I walk over there to prime the vacuum hose and rotate the return, it rows itself slowly away from my advancing legs and feet. I know it won't bite so generally it doesn't bother me that we have yet another pet around here.

Our first summer there were two or three boatmen. Last year I don't remember seeing a single one. I know that they aren't the least bit perturbed when I shock the pool - no manner of superchlorination slows them down. They feed on algae, and there's surely not much of that.

So most days when I'm cleaning the pool, the boatman and I respect one another's presence. It's fast enough that I couldn't get it with the vacuum even if I wanted to. But for some reason today, I didn't want it there, under my feet. After I gathered up several large, fat garden spiders from the bottom, I decided to use the hose end to fetch up the water boatman. The boatman didn't cooperate.

They are strong swimmers, indeed. I could see that it was caught in the current of the vacuum, but it kept rowing away, enough that it wasn't sucked into the hose. All the time I was doing this I wondered why - what in me needed such cleanliness as to deny the boatman his own personal 40,000 gallon aquarium? Maybe I was bored. I don't know. I finally got the hose close enough to it on the pool bottom and the boatman vanished into the hose.

Of course, I couldn't let it end there. I felt bad to have done it. It seemed more an exercise, a test. So when I reset to half-suction on each intake skimmer port, and after I reeled up the hose, I went back and opened the skimmer to fetch the boatman out and let it just go back into the pool. He was swimming freely in the vortex of the skimmer, and by the time I'd gone for the small mesh "net", the boatman had escaped back into the pool all on its own.

Now that's creepy. I had a dream a few weeks ago about a water boatman in our pool, and it was the size of a large kayak. This guy is only about a half-inch long, but it has the power to swim against the force of the pump. It's impressive. And it's creepy. Now I'm going to have to give it a name or something, get it a collar, a toy - I don't know. All I know is that the pool belongs to the water boatman. But it's generally a good sport, so that shouldn't bother us one way or the other.