Anti-crab marquee lights

Asleep on the beach, I awoke to a stinging pain in my elbow. I jerked my head up and was horrified to see what looked like dozens of large spiders scurrying away. They were really crabs. Inch long black-brown ugly things. They had been watching me, and had decided I was dead. “Go away!” I shouted, throwing a spray of sand at them. They backed off, but waited there outside of throwing distance, waiting me out, waiting for me to be no longer non-dead. Snoozing was impossible.

So I tried different things. I made a beach towel with tiny whirligigs stuck all around it. Very festive. And it even worked until the breeze died down. But it was not rugged enough -- all the whirlies broke off in the wash.

Then I hit upon the marquee light idea. Filling a clear plastic tube with a stringer of LEDs, I rigged up a controller to blink them in sequence so that it looked like there was constant movement, like marquee lights. Making a circle of constant movement around my towel with it, I’ve created a crab-free zone. No worries now. But sometimes I think that they’re still out there, in their burrows, watching me, waiting for the batteries to die...