Repel boarders
Anastasia
Phil May and Andrea Twigg
Thu 10 Nov 2011 08:19
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This morning I was woken at 7:30 by Andrea shouting
"Get out, get out". An unusually vivid dream, I thought, and then realized
she was sitting up and shouting at an apparition in the porthole. There,
silhouetted against the dawning sky, was a black cat creeping into our
cabin. It only woke Andrea because it was on the bookcase above
her side of the bed, looking down and dripping cold seawater on her
head. It was totally soaked so it must have swum aboard. It looked
particularly scary with its hair all plastered down, the kind of outline
they use to depict evil cats in cartoons.
It left pretty quickly when it realized Andrea
wasn't ready for her morning shower just yet. We hurried up on deck to see
where it had gone. There are several water trails, the
heaviest trail leading up from the sugar scoop across the cockpit and to our
inboard porthole. We can't see any trail obviously leaving the boat.
It is low tide right now so it would have to scale a smooth 9 ft concrete
wall to get back to dry land, but maybe it managed it. Or perhaps it
swam or leaped to a neighboring boat.
On another subject, I can't believe that last night
we pulled a load of flags attached to a flimsy bit of string using our precious
spinnaker halyard. If the flag string should break (and we pulled it nice
and tight so the flags are not droopy) then the halyard would come snaking
through the blocks and down the inside of the mast. Then we
would have to try and re-thread it from the top of the
mast. First thing this morning we will be attaching a safety line to
the halyard.
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