So here I am in the naughty chair – AGAIN !

I have sailed thousands of miles with this Captain, and I hear everything although I don’t say much, and I think our Captain is getting a bit too autocratic for his own good. He seems to think I hero-worship him and to be honest I do most of the time. However enough is enough as I get sent to this naughty chair far too often and sometimes very unfairly. He doesn’t appreciate how painful it is sitting with my tail between my legs for hours on end. In addition he always gives me the dogwatch and only one daily ration of peanuts and it’s not very satisfactory even for this faithful hound. I know the crew must be thinking the same because I regularly hear flogging from up on deck, and this morning I picked up whispering between them and with my particularly acute hearing this is what I heard.

The tall one was saying “do you know he asked me to be the replacement spinnaker pole for the rest of this passage?”

The other one said “maybe we should just push him overboard”.

Now call me Christian if you like but I think we could set him adrift in the dinghy, remind him that Shackleton managed 800 miles in a small boat to find South Georgia, and for a navigator of his experience he should be able to make it to the Falklands not much more than 400 miles away.

After looking down on the chart table for all these years from where my kennel is, I don’t think I would have any trouble captaining the ship and crew to Pitcairn Island.

Maybe we should all sleep on it and hope he mends his ways overnight.