And Another Thing

Distance: 130/1300 Day 12

Tonight I wish to complain about the cat. The cat was not my idea, I fought her addition to the boat for years, and I capitulated only after setting many conditions and stipulations including that she must be a she named Dulcinea. We have spent oodles of money on this rotten blighter as well as imposing mercilessly and unfairly on the friendship of someone who is more important than any beast.

The beast has three problems.

1) Sand - Her litter box sand is fine and clean, straight from the beaches of La Paz. With these following winds, we get a lovely breeze straight into the cockpit and bam on to the litter box shooting fine grit sand in every direction. The cockpit looks and feels like floor of a beach front park restroom.

2) Hair - Coming as she did from Seattle, Dulcinea brought with her a coat worthy of a hibernating grizzly bear. This is, of course, hopelessly overdressed for the tropics. So our fashionista cat is taking her coat off rapidly. She moves in a nimbus of grey and black fur which, once aborn, sticks to every damp, salty surface. The interior of the boat now resembles a 70's love parlor complete with fur wall paper.

3) Hunting - To digress a bit, it is worth adding two new air born nuisances to my list of mid-oceanic nautical visitors: flying fish and flying octopi. The former are visible during the day as flitting schools of darting silver hummingbirds that scatter before the bows of the boat. The later squirt their guts to jet propel themselves out of the mouths of large fish and into the air. Apparently interpreting the hulls of Don Quixote as comparable to a beluga whale, they jet out of the water all around us.

During the day, fish and octopi manage to avoid us, scattering in all directions. However, at night, they are terminally stupid or fatalistically suicidal and routinely land on the foredeck. On their arrival, Dulci immediately goes into frantic hunter mode. While Don Quixote rockets along in 12' swells surfing down the waves at something like 8 knots, our predator leaps on the foredeck and stalks her prey. Grabbing it, she hauls it back through the mast hatches and deposits it in the middle of the salon. There she carefully removes its motility appendages -- in the case of the fish the fins are carefully excised, with the octopi she simply eats the legs. Then she merrows her triumph, and leaves the eviscerated remains for DrC to gather as fish bait in the morning. By the time my shift is over at 5am, the salon is a fish abattoir as I gingerly make my way to the galley counters to prepare breakfast. The cat, exhausted and completely replete on the salon jelly bean seat, doesn't even twitch a whisker when I scream in horror as I squish black ink between my toes.

I am ready to pitch the cat overboard.

PPJ Note #5: SOFT SCRUB. Bring lots. There is nothing quite so magical in its ability to remove coffee, wine, tea, and squid ink from white fiberglass.

~ Toast
April 28, 1230 UTC
N06 00.1 W125 55.0 210T 7.8kts

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