Valé Dixie

One year ago we awoke on Boxing Day to find Dixie missing.

She had been living on board for 5 years, and had never fallen overboard, or even shown the least interest in getting into the water.

Xmas Night had been flat calm, with no waves or rocking. But mysteriously, she was gone, from the very same anchorage where a friend had lost his cat exactly one year earlier.

We spent a month searching.

In the first 24 hours, we concentrated on searching every floating buoy and piece of debris in the entirety of Chalong Bay, plus the immediate foreshore just 100m from the boat.

As the days went by, we widened the search, to include the floating village of fishermen, every boat in the bay, and even rented scooters to search the entire 20km plus of the foreshore.

We put up reward posters, and contacted every vet and animal welfare organisation in Phuket.

And every day, morning and night, we'd walk the foreshore at Panwa Beach calling and calling.

There were several leads and false starts, phone calls and texts from people responding to the posters, and many gracious locals and expats who helped us in our search.

But it was all to no avail.

Agonisingly, on 1st February, we had to set sail for Sri Lanka - already a year behind schedule and with our weather window for the Indian Ocean in 2020 again under time pressure.

And as we raised anchor and headed West, Panwa Beach and our hopes of ever seeing Dixie again receded into the distance.

We cried and cried.  Certainly not our first tears of that month.  Nor were they to be our last.  But they were easily the most poignant, the symbolism of the moment impossible to escape.

Losing a beloved pet is hard under any circumstances, but seemed even more so in our specific situation.

In our tiny floating home, she was our constant companion.  We rescued her from the cat shelter 10 year previously, and for the first 5 years of our lives together, she was an outdoors cat who made friends with all the neighbours and random passers by. In that sense she was pretty independent.

But in the 5 years since we moved aboard, she was never more than 25 feet away, and in the 1.5 years since leaving Sydney she was our one constant connection to home.

During long night watches on multi-day passages, she never left the cockpit, the only crew member to keep watch permanently as Jen and I passed the baton on 4 hour watches.

Every time we returned to the boat having gone ashore, she would hear the outboard engine and come running up to the aft deck to greet us and tell us all about what had been happening in our absence.

When you live aboard a boat with your partner 24/7/365, it's makes for a pretty intense relationship, and having a third party as a focal point somehow eases the pressure a bit.

Partly it's about having someone else to care for. Partly its about the extra layer of fun and activity that having a third personality adds into the boat’s dynamic.

And she also had a sixth sense about our happiness, and would come and plonk herself on to one of our laps if we were feeling sad, or angry.  It's pretty hard to be snippy with your partner while you're stroking a cat!

On the odd occasion when the weather was rough while we were at sea, she'd cling on to one of us and demand some reassurance, all the better to distract us from any concerns we might be feeling ourselves in the moment. 

Every person who came on to Steely was utterly charmed by her...even those who didn't like cats.

On one occasion, a tense situation with a customs officer who unexpectedly boarded Steel Sapphire in Indonesia, was completely diffused when he spotted her fur on our cockpit cushions.

"You have a cat on board?", he asked sternly.

"Er, yes", we gulped, aware that, having not declared her during our check in process, we might be in trouble.

"I LOVE cats!", he exclaimed, before giving a nonplussed Dixie lots of pats.

All these memories, and a thousand more, were flooding our minds as we sailed to Sri Lanka.

As the first night watch began, her absence was overwhelming.  We consoled ourselves with the thought that the intensity of the sense of loss would pass. 

And it has.

But never a day goes by without us being reminded of our faithful little crew member with the spunkiest personality and the softest, whitest fur ever.

Valé Dixie.  Gone, but never forgotten.