Beryl On How To Be A Highly Successful Ship’s Cat

Over the next few weeks, Beryl will share her secrets for the highly successful life of a ship’s cat. Today, she will start with the easy stuff. Don’t ever forget, though, when you’re the ship’s cat, you are the most important entity on the ship and your life is full of duty. Things to do? First, making sure to roll around on the cockpit sole and get enough sun on your belly. The task must be completed in the cutest way possible for the ship’s company to see.

After getting enough sun, supervising the skipper and crew are important tasks for the ship’s cat. When the designated watch-stander human is looking at something, it’s always important to immediately find out if you can sit on it. If you can’t, then look at it too.

Helpers

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Every boater needs a little help sometimes. In days gone by, tug boats could be counted upon to help bring ships into harbors. We arrived in Newport Beach Harbor last night and found this lovely tug boat moored near the anchorage at the end of Lido Island.

Along with the ship, often came another helper–the ship’s cat. The cats aboard could chase away rodents and improve crew morale. Yesterday, here on Mahdee, ship’s cat Beryl did a great job of supervising the navigation by sitting on the chart table all day long.

Finches?

I mentioned in my previous post that the tempting sound of finches brought Beryl out onto the foredeck. What I did not mention was that David and I decided to leave a bird’s nest in place inside the foresail cover. It had 6 eggs in it–and from the blue green color with brown dots, I ID’d the eggs as likely to be of finches. The parent birds look like some sort of finch. A Google search gave me the insights that we might be rid of our guests by the 1st week of June. However, today’s look into the nest at the fluffy little birds really has me wondering how they’re going to just manage to fly away in 3 weeks. Nah. I’m thinking we’re going to be spending a lot more time dingy sailing in May and June than we’d originally intended.

I joked with David that we’d just go ahead and start sailing with jib, staysail, and main since we often sail with that combination anyway. He questioned whether momma and daddy bird would keep up with us. I suppose there’s a chance they wouldn’t. Thus, we’ll be dingy sailing the local sloughs a bit longer than expected.

Here’s some pics. First, the fluffy little birds in the sail cover. Really there ARE at least 5 that I could count in the nest. In the pic, it looks like a bundle of fluff.

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Second pic–David and buddy Beryl sitting in the main saloon while David does something on the computer.

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