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It has been suggested that the name of this page should be changed. We no longer have a dog to watch. Blue, who eventually grew to accept stardom as no more than his due, retired gracefully to the obscurity of the Scottish Highlands at the end of the summer.
And we are left to make spluttering apologies to his fans.
"How's the dog?" people ask when we arrive somewhere new. Not "How are you?" you notice. Or "How's the boat?" or even, might I suggest: "How's the baby?"
But then the baby is part of the reason for the dog being put ashore - that and the practicalities of four of us on an 8 metre boat, not to mention all that hair blocking the pumps and the way the companionway always seemed to be full of dog... and his nocturnal wandering.
In fact it was this last little failing which started us thinking about his future even before the baby arrived.
The problem was that Blue had his own cabin and was ÿ÷ÿ¿ÿ¿expected to give it up when guests came to stay. You would have thought that he would have been content. I mean, how many dogs get a 3ft 6in x 6ft 6in berth all to themselves?
But Blue preferred the saloon settee. He used to creep out there in the middle of the night - which was fine until Tamsin's pregnancy advanced to the stage where she began to make the customary nocturnal visits to the head. Then Blue would bolt back to his cabin, leaving only a patch of suspiciously warm Dralon as evidence.
Such was the routine when my oldest son Olly came to stay. Olly duly took over Blue's cabin and Blue moved with his bed onto the saloon settee for the night.
It was some time in the small hours when the brain (both human and canine) is at its lowest ebb that Tamsin rose from her bed. In an instant the dog was awake, realised he was in forbidden territory and - with a single bound - was gone.
A second bound took him back to his own berth. On this occasion there was someone else in it; someone who was peacefully asleep with absolutely no idea that at any moment a large black dog would join him in something of a hurry. Sure enough Blue landed on the precise spot where his bed would normally have been. The precise spot was occupied by Olly's stomach.
The pandemonium which followed was magnificent - even Wagnerian. The memory has kept us entertained on dull winter evenings ever since. But Blue never saw the joke. This was a shame. Even Olly saw the joke eventually.
But would it be a joke when we had a baby in that bunk? And besides, what of the more distant future: was it really fair to take an elderly mongrel who had known only paltry British summers and expect him to acclimatise to the burning heat of the Mediterranean? And given Britain's archaic quarantine laws how could we ever come back?
We began to look for a new home for Blue. We put up notices in yacht clubs: "Boat Dog free to good home. Well used to dinghies and ladders. 24 hour bladder."
Whenever an appreciative audience gathered at the dockside to applaud the dog who lay passively across my forearms as I climbed fifteen metres up a slimy ladder, my response suddenly became: "Do you want him?"
(continue)
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