Finally got some pictures off the camera. Here’s Mahdee right after we rounded Point Conception–motor sailing in the calm evening. A bit of swell but no wind.

The ship’s cat, our seafaring feline friend, Beamer, passed on to Fiddlers’ Green yesterday morning. His demise was the onset of a severe bronchial condition. He will be missed. Beamer was with us for 15 years. He was born in Richmond, Virginia in July of 1994 and we became his family in January of 1995.

A majestic Maine Coon, he was shy for the first decade of his life, with two other cats in the family. Once they passed on, he became “number one cat” and the personality change was amazing. No longer reticent, he demanded attention and any lap available became his command-and-control seat. He moved aboard Mahdee when we did, in the boatyard August 1st, 2008. From the start, he loved his home aboard Mahdee more than anyplace he’d lived with us. He was most happy as a seagoing cat. He enjoyed (or perhaps put up with) Mahdee’s launch, our various short voyages around the San Diego area with Mahdee and before Mahdee aboard Stargazer, our Rawson 30. He claimed the galley and main saloon as “cat central” and kept a chatty conversation going with the humans who passed through his territory.

We bid a fond farewell to the best ship’s cat we could have had.

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Here are a few pictures of Beamer as we best remember him:

Dreaming about sailing? Nowhere is Too Far by the Cruising Club of America is his pillow in the below pic.

As a kitten, he surely had seafaring dreams. Look at that happy face:

Whenever a chair became available after being warmed up by a human sitting there–Beamer was in it:

Better yet, sitting on David’s lap:

Or just hanging out with David, his favorite buddy:

Crammed into a cubby on Stargazer while at sea:

Sleeping in the boat during the construction of the stateroom bed…of course, in the way, under the stateroom bed:

Last week, not feeling well, but enjoying a hug:

In David’s last post, he mentions fixing the windlass brake he also mentions “problems with the mainsail leather straps”…well, those problems were that numerous of the old lashings holding the bronze cars to sail managed to break as the wind piped up on our new year’s eve sail. Just as things were getting “nice” with some good healthy winds it was chink, chink, chink, as each of the old lashes broke and the bronze cars slid down the track and hit the car below it. We doused the sail after about 6 broke free (click on this link and you’ll see a pic I took looking up at the problem. Just below the spreaders you’ll see one good car and then three eyelets which aren’t attached to the track. Then, a bit further down, another!). At the time, we didn’t know if the breakage was just the few old lashings or if it was happening to new lashings, too. As it turned out, it was just the few old ones left.

David and I spent last Saturday, at anchor “fixing”. David doing his rivets on the brake and me putting new leather lashings onto the remaining cars that had had (or still had) old leather lashings. I’d already done about 3/4 of them with new leather before putting up the sail, so my part took very little time. The sail is heavy, so I just took most of the luff off of the track and used some line to tie the sail down to the cabin top so it wouldn’t blow away while I worked.

We planned on sailing Sunday, but David and I ended up taking much of that day working on the rigging–me splicing thimbles into running rigging, sewing leather chafe guard over blocks and fittings which remain aloft on the topping lift and David making a becket for a block he’d rebuilt to be used for the staysail (and installing it) as well as climbing the mainmast to install my newly made topping lift.

David drilling for the rivets in the newly painted steel ring. You can see the uninstalled brake pad/shoe in the bottom of the picture, btw :

The finished rivets:

My “work area” of sail tied to the cabin top, reel of spare anchor rode as a seat, Latigo leather laid out on the deck for cutting into strip:

I’m happy to be done with my work–here I’m showing off a sail slide lashing: