Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  As the waif fleshed out on a regular diet and the little bit of begrudging affection we gave it, the dark-grey stripes on his fur stood out from their light-grey furry backdrop. One evening, over a few beers after work, I decided he looked like a pin-striped Italian dandy and dubbed him Luigi — a name he wore for the rest of his adventurous life.

  There were a few practical considerations: Elkouba had no refrigeration and we had no intention of wasting time, money and space installing it. The cat would, like us, have to eat fresh food when it was available and dried or canned food when it wasn’t. The big problem was at the other end of the feline food chain — what to do with the pussy doodoo. We asked around the other yachts who had cats on board, and they all advised using a standard plastic cat litter container, kept above decks when that was practical and emptied over the side on a regular basis.

  So, when Elkouba finally bid farewell to the boat yard of her rebirth and motored out of River Bend Marina, she had a new crew member sitting smugly on the foredeck and taking in the sights and smells as we negotiated the four lift-and-swing bridges and through the harbour basin that stood between us and the Atlantic Ocean.

  We stopped at Fernandina Beach in North Florida to finish off the refit, and moored at a boat yard up a muddy creek. Almost every morning there would be one or two small, muddy fish left in the cockpit and we suspected that local fishermen had thrown them to Luigi on their way home from fishing — until, at low tide one morning, we noticed a set of feline pug-marks, like a pygmy lion’s, through the mud on the river bank towards the water. The return paw prints had a drag mark beside them which trailed all the way to the muddy fish in Elkouba’s cockpit. Luigi turned fishercat after dark and was dragging his catch home to show off in the light of day.

  By that time, Luigi had taken over the boat yard and slept in whatever sunny spot took his fancy during the day. The yard workers came down to see the proof of his fishing prowess. ‘Y’all orta be careful,’ they cautioned, ‘this here river’s full of alligators — they’s getting dawgs here all the time.’ But cat meat can’t have tickled the alligators’ fancy, because Luigi fished there almost every night for the few months we stayed.

  Another favourite pastime was lounging on the mainsail cover, then launching himself onto the humps in the canvas dodger made by people’s heads as they came and went through Elkouba’s main hatch. This was guaranteed to raise startled shrieks from some visitors.

  Our little grey cat must have come from a line of seafaring felines. As Elkouba covered ground northwards, he settled in as though he’d been at sea all his life. We were boarded by black-clad, gun-wielding US Coastguard personnel south of Cape Hatteras, who searched the boat for drugs then stayed with us for several hours while they waited for further orders. Luigi, the traitor, took the interlopers in his stride and even managed to soften their hard military demeanour by rubbing his ears on their combat boots. Perhaps they assumed we were communist infiltrators — two aliens in a red boat — but the CIA could neither confirm nor deny, and they eventually left us alone to continue our voyage.

  We’d lived at Essex, Connecticut for a couple of years before buying Elkouba and beginning her refit in Florida, and we called in to say goodbye to all our friends there before we left the United States. In the event, we were offered work and decided to stay for another year to refurbish our cruising kitty. We did several delivery trips down the Intracoastal Waterway, generally accompanied by the little grey cat who paced the deck, sniffing the breeze, or lay taking the sun as the scenery slid past.

  One job was delivering a 58-foot Hatteras Gamefisher from Connecticut to take part in a game-fishing tournament from Palm Beach. We’d crunched through a thin layer of surface ice in upper Delaware Bay, but the ambient temperature rose with every mile of southing and by the time we got to Coinjock, North Carolina, Luigi’s winter coat was beginning to fall. We tied to the dock, had dinner and turned in, but were woken early next morning by the marina manager. ‘Y’all got a liddle pussy cat on thet thyar boat?’ he drawled. I nodded assent. ‘I thought so,’ he replied, ‘he done comed home with me for the night and was waiting in the ol’ pickup truck for a ride back to the boat this morning.’

  We worried about our feline shipmate missing out on the fun and skills his shorebound fellows enjoyed. Once, on a charter trip to the Bahamas, we anchored off Norman Cay, a nature reserve where metre-long iguanas warmed their cool blood on the sunny beaches. We wondered what Luigi would make of these giant lizards, and coaxed him into the Zodiac inflatable for a trip ashore. The little grey cat became a feline St George with a bevy of dragons to tackle. He hid behind rocks and leapt on the iguanas as they lumbered past, then nimbly skipped out of their path when they charged in retaliation. For over an hour he stalked iguanas, leaping on their backs and batting them about with closed paws, until we scooped the exhausted kitten off the sand and took him back to the boat.

  As the Zodiac neared the mother ship, Luigi took his usual flying leap for the deck — but, being tired, he missed the toe rail by 10 centimetres, thudded into the hull and plopped into the sea. While we were manoeuvring the Zodiac to pick him up, he swam unconcernedly around to the stern and scrambled into the nearest dry refuge, the 150-millimetre-diameter exhaust pipe which was mounted a couple of centimetres above the waterline. Once inside, he began to yowl piteously, the noise amplified by 10 and resounding through the metres of exhaust pipe.

  Eventually we lured him out with a selection of his favourite food, rinsed him in warm, fresh water and put him on deck to dry out in the sun, exhausted by a day’s hard adventuring.

  Luigi was a great hit back at Essex, skipping from boat to boat while we bobbed, rafted up in the river, for a final farewell party before heading north east to Nova Scotia. Local sailors call it going ‘Down East’ — because the prevailing winds are almost always from astern — and we had a few months of God’s own gunkholing through the little ports of New England, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine.

  Luigi was no problem with the affable gentleman who cleared us into Shelburne, Nova Scotia. By then he’d been neutered and had an ‘Animal Pratique Passport’ with his photograph and all his inoculation records, signed off by the veterinarians who had administered them. In the fishing ports of Nova Scotia, he flourished. As dusk crept across the waterfront, Luigi would slink out to the side-deck nearest the wharf and sit there, feigning disinterest while he scanned the horizon for dogs or other hazards and plotted his night’s activities. Then, with a flick of his tail under the lifelines, he would be gone; a sleek grey shape merging into the dusk among the packhouses, fishing gear and piles of net on the wharf.

  When we rose in the morning he would be sitting in the cockpit, smugly licking his paws and emanating a palpable aura of self-satisfaction. Or else curled up and dead to the world in his cardboard box near the mast step.

  If the night life at any particular port of call had been especially good, Luigi wouldn’t make it back aboard, and the first few times it happened, this worried us greatly. But we soon found that if we walked around the vicinity and called his name a few times, he’d come bounding out from under the nearest warehouse or boat shed, or slither down a neighbouring tree trunk and be on board in time to sail.

  As we sailed further north, the tropical cat’s coat thickened up to protect him from the plummeting temperatures. He was welcomed to Lunenburg by the local constabulary, who’d seen our New Zealand flag and come down to see if we had any postal stamps he could add to his collection. Luigi had the run of the replica schooner, Bluenose II, which we rafted up to in Halifax and amazed her crew by running up and down the rigging on the ratlines.

  At Baddeck, in the Bras d’Or Lakes, we tied up to the government wharf and bought cod cheeks or tongue for breakfast. Two each for the humans and one for the cat. Luigi even developed a taste for Solomon Gundy, the delicious pickled herring that’s a local delicacy.

  We motored gingerly into the fog-bound harbour at St Pier
re guided partly by Luigi’s nose, which we figured must be pointing at the fishing wharf, and partly electronically by radar, sampled some French cuisine and felt our way through the fog to Newfoundland.

  Luigi became a hit with the small-boat fishermen of St John’s. At first light the staccato bark of their make-or-break petrol engines echoed across the harbour, and Luigi would be on deck to greet them (and relieve them of a choice cod liver or two). ‘There’s a swish party at Quidi Vidi — you ought to come on over,’ they invited. We motored Elkouba into the perfect, almost land-locked harbour with its lining of smooth granite boulders and cliffs, and were directed to a mooring among the fishing boats.

  Just after dusk we rowed ashore, tied our dinghy to the fish-restaurant dock, and followed the directions we’d been given to the party. In the old days, dory schooners would fish the Grand Banks for cod, salt the catch and sail to the West Indies to trade it for rum. The rum was shipped back to Newfoundland in oak barrels and repackaged for smuggling into liquor-hungry ports in the USA during prohibition. The rum was called ‘screech’ and still is, but the empty barrels filled with water and left to steep for a year or two were broached by the locals to give ‘swish’. Almost any party, these days, was a swish party, and it was well on the way to midnight before, arms linked, we stumbled through the fog back to our dinghy.

  No light penetrated the dense fog; we walked into a few road signs, bounced off some walls, and finally found the wharf where our dinghy waited. ‘Damn — we should have left an anchor light or something on,’ Sarah whispered. I rowed gingerly into the dark — there were no landmarks, no visibility, just a thick, dank fog. We rowed into a wall of thick smoke.

  ‘Sshhh … did you hear that?’ Sarah whispered. Somewhere in the fog there was a high pitched yeowll, like fingernails on a blackboard, piercing through the thick fog. ‘Luigi.’ she called, and the cat yowled again. ‘Over there,’ she pointed, and I rowed towards the noise. We stopped and repeated the process until, a few minutes later, the dinghy thunked into the red side of our yacht as it materialized out of the mist. Safe on board, we lit our little pot-belly stove and Luigi curled up beside it, basking smugly in its warmth and our appreciation.

  After a few weeks in Newfoundland, we headed Elkouba towards Iceland and nosed her between Reykjavik’s twin breakwaters about 10 days later. Luigi’s ocean-going regimen consisted mostly of sleeping, eating and toilet which had worked out pretty much as our advisors in Florida had recommended. We’d long since given up on buying sacks of kitty litter, though, and instead just collected sand from the local beach wherever we happened to be, and used that instead.

  Luigi knew what it was like to spend a long trick at the helm on a cold North Atlantic night, and would meow at the hatch, leap out after we’d opened it, and squirm his way up under our wet-weather gear to cuddle up, purring, in our laps. Otherwise he’d be curled cosily beside the pot-belly stove. There is surely nothing more guaranteed to restore one’s core body temperature than the sight of a warm, contented cat. He responded to stroking from our white, frozen fingers with the same deep purr he’d given in the tropics.

  As soon as land came within range of Luigi’s keen olfactory senses, he’d be up and running around the deck; his nose wrinkling like a hyperactive butterfly, keen for the next adventure. Icelandic quarantine authorities weren’t too keen on letting him (or us) ashore to start with, and it took a day of negotiations with officials and frequent referrals to combined paperwork for us, Elkouba and the cat before they relented. Luigi quickly made himself at home on the whale-chaser we were rafted to. We soon had hardened whale-men leaning over their bulwarks miaowing to attract Luigi’s attention as he lolled on deck in the late summer sun.

  Reykjavik is often called the ‘smokeless city’ — all buildings are heated with clean and ultra-efficient geothermal steam, so I prowled the wharves, often accompanied by the cat who had formed a longstanding love affair with the pot-belly stove, collecting every little piece of wood I could find.

  The next port of call was Heimaey, a small island south of Iceland proper, where Luigi once again made friends with the local fishermen, using the combination of leg-rubbing sycophancy and self-confident savoir faire he had developed to wangle titbits out of the hardest-hearted fisher. People in many of the ports we visited will have long forgotten Elkouba, Sarah and me, but I’m sure most remember Luigi. In Heimaey, classes of school kids trooped down the dock to observe at first hand the cat who’d sailed the Atlantic. We were just the side act — like we’d flown in to help tie up in port. But he was great PR and we didn’t mind playing second (or third) fiddles in our oceangoing quartet: Luigi, Sarah, myself and Elkouba.

  Weeks later, after a stormy October passage from Heimaey, Luigi caught his first whiff of Scotland and ran excitedly from one end of Elkouba to the other or romped on the canvas dodger as we spent the night navigating down the western approaches, round the Mull of Kintyre and into Campbelltown. By dawn he had run out of steam and squirrelled himself away among the sails in the forepeak, where he stayed, sound asleep, while the customs and quarantine people were aboard. This was where we expected our first real quarantine problems, and was the reason we’d been so scrupulous with Luigi’s inoculations and paperwork.

  Britain’s island status, with continental Europe full of foreign diseases looming just a few kilometres away across the North Sea, has led to a certain siege mentality among the British. ‘Are there any animals aboard?’ the clearance papers asked. One of my great failings is the inability to tell a lie. It has effectively precluded me from a career in politics or boat-broking, and I often admire some people’s ability to lie their way out of tight corners. So I ticked the little box marked ‘yes’. ‘If so, give details’ a larger box demanded, and I left it empty … which isn’t really lying.

  It was early on Saturday morning, and maybe our customs officer was in a hurry to get home to his haggis or weekend football game. It was an oversight that might have cost a case of whisky in more corrupt countries, but the customs officer glanced at the completed forms, shuffled them into a pile, stamped our passports and prepared to leave. ‘Welcome tae Scootland,’ he said cheerily. I quietly closed the fo’c’s’le door so Luigi didn’t come waltzing out in mid-farewell.

  So Luigi became a Scottish cat. I reasoned that if anyone wanted him quarantined or deported, it was up to them to prove that he hadn’t strolled aboard in Campbelltown. As we motored slowly into Douglas, Isle of Man, Luigi sat proudly on the foredeck and a launch with ‘Harbourmaster’ painted on the side pulled out and said we weren’t allowed in the harbour with a cat aboard. ‘But — he’s a Scottish cat — from Campbelltown,’ I protested. They grudgingly let us stay for a few days, but twice I caught them studying Luigi through binoculars from the watchhouse windows. Looking for signs of foreign-ness, no doubt.

  We locked into Swansea Marina on the Welsh coast, and nobody seemed to care about Luigi as he strolled the docks, sniffing around whatever boat took his fancy. He soon became a favourite of the live-aboard yachties, and their children jostled beside Elkouba to pat the cat as he lay in the paltry patches of sunshine.

  Elkouba, Sarah and I melted into downtown Bristol, living on the docks and working in the city. Some passers-by expressed concern at seeing an animal, possibly rabid, living on a foreign-flagged vessel, but backed off when we explained that he’d come aboard in Scotland.

  Luigi had a few adventures: falling into the rancid water of the docks while returning on board at low tide from an overnight rat-hunting mission in the neighbouring warehouses, and often snoozing in some secluded spot ashore for the day. We had about 30 centimetres of snow on deck during the winter and Luigi, tropical feline that he was, stayed curled up beside the stove which kept Elkouba snug all day. We had a Honda 175-cc motorcycle and he took a few turns around the city on that, peeking from a shoulder bag that was slung around my neck, his eyes narrowed and ears flattened against the slipstream.

  In the spring Luigi sailed
north; up the coast of Ireland and through the Hebridean Islands. Someone must have reported the foreign-flag vessel with an animal aboard at Fort William, and an earnest young bloke in HM Customs uniform pursued Elkouba through all eight locks in Neptune’s Staircase, near Fort William, demanding proof that Luigi was Scottish. He had retrieved our original clearance forms from Campbelltown and pointed out that I’d ticked ‘yes’ to having an animal aboard, and refused to believe that it was just an error made by a tired sailor.

  The customs bloke badgered us, on and off, the entire 100-kilometre length of the canal and must have passed the word on to the local police forces. Coppers demanded to see our papers in Inverness, and a policewoman in Kirkwall, the Orkney Islands capital, insisted that we lock Luigi up in case he contracted rabies from the German yacht tied alongside us. Meanwhile, the source of all the excitement blithely followed his normal regimen of food, sleep, daily promenade round the deck and trot ashore of an evening.

  Rabies really is an issue in the Arctic, though, carried by foxes that freely cross between America and Scandinavia on the winter ice pack, and we didn’t want to take Luigi to Norway. We made friends in Shetland and Luigi moved into their barn while Elkouba sailed north. He quickly earned a reputation as an ardent and lethal mouser and spent a feral summer on the land until we returned to pick him up in late September.

  Bitter gale-force winds had started to sweep the north, and Elkouba’s cosy confines must have looked pretty attractive to Luigi as he sailed to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. Elkouba, and Luigi, settled in among the inshore fishing fleet and it wasn’t long before he had the tough Scottish fisherfolk wound round his little grey paws. ‘Och here,’ they’d say, and proffer a gut-splattered bucket, ‘I saved some livers for yer wee poossy.’