I thought I'd share a cat tax, cruising tax story to lighten the mood for a bit in these difficult and frightening times. This is the story of our past kittens and our first boat Sum-R-Skool. I hope you enjoy.

Secret Passages

When a boater wants to find out how seaworthy a boat is they hire a marine surveyor to go over the vessel. But what do you do when you want to know just what the "ins and outs" are of the interior? You bring two nine-week old kittens on board.

My husband and I owned a 34-foot Mainship II on which we spent the better part of our summers. I knew it was a drafty boat but never could figure out why we had so much trouble heating it. Then we acquired two kittens and brought them on board to share our summer way of life and love of boating. Chloe and Riley adjusted quickly to living on the boat. They curled up together in a ball on the couch for naps, flew around the decks, and enjoyed being with their 'people'. I felt things were going well until the day I left the boat for a shore trip. When I left, our babies were curled up on the sunny couch taking their afternoon nap. I closed and locked the aft door and merrily went about my business on shore.

Upon returning to the Sum- R-Skool I noticed Chloe and Riley were no longer cat napping. As a matter of fact they were nowhere to be found. I searched all their usual haunts: under the comforters on the bunks, behind the couch, and in the head. There weren't too many places they could go, given the size of our vessel, or so I thought. I began opening closed doors and cabinets knowing full well there was no way they could be inside any of these enclosures. I stripped the bunks of their linens; no kittens. I moved the couch; no kittens.

By now I had convinced myself that my husband must have taken them out on the docks with him. I searched him out, but alas, he did not have the elusive felines. Upon returning to our vessel we were shocked to find them sitting out in the cockpit, happy to have their people back on board. But how did they get outside? Had they zipped past me and out the door without my seeing them? Boy, did I feel dumb! After quite a ribbing from my husband I put this episode behind me and the kittens behind the sliding glass door.

Later that evening we were sitting outside in the cockpit enjoying the ambiance of a long awaited balmy summer evening when "PLOP!" Riley appeared in the cockpit from under the gunwale. He then sat there looking from whence he came until Chloe plopped onto the cockpit floor. Relieved that I wan't a negligent parent, my husband and I began working on the situation at hand. Somehow Chloe and Riley were getting into the port wall of the boat and exiting in the cockpit. We took care of the obvious by plugging the hole under the gunwale with an old pillow but tracking down the interior entrance was going to be more time consuming.

After several days of continuous watching and listening I heard footsteps in the wall. Tracking the sound through the boat I apprehended one of our fuzzy babies crawling out from under the lower cabinets in the galley. There it was – the entrance to their escape route. Several throw rugs and two deflated floats later the situation was under control. We could now return to the good life where we were in control of when the cats went out and when they stayed inside. Or so we thought!

Riley, the more adventurous of the two kittens, was not to be defeated so easily. I'm sure he thought he had found a way to outsmart his people and once again breathe fresh air when he wanted to. However, the next route did not work out too well for him. I learned of his plight early one Saturday morning when I awoke to the muffled sound of a kitten meowing. It was a mournful sound which was turning to a frantic cry as I became fully conscious. I search everywhere trying to track down the sound's location. Our roadblocks were still in place so he wan't in the wall of the boat. He wan't in the cockpit and he wan't on the dock having coffee with my husband. My fear was that he had fallen over board. With the aid of some pier mates, we searched the nearby breakwaters as well as under the piers. No Riley. Our search returned to the boat interior. By now Riley's calls were considerably louder and we were able to trace them the floor of the main salon. After rolling back the carpet and lifting the hatches to expose the engine compartment, the lost was found. There was a forlorn Riley in the bilge clinging as best he could to the slanting walls of that compartment. Freed from his dark dungeon, Riley spent the rest of the morning sleeping while Clark and I crawled around on our hands and knees stuffing anything we could find into any open space we encountered.

When we sold the Sum-R-Skool and bought Kindred Spirit Chloe and Riley spent the first three years investigating her interior. To their dismay Kindred Spirit was better built with no accessible secret passages to the outside world. We did have to watch them like hawks though whenever any hatch was opened.

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