October 10-16 -- The Season's Last Two Day Sails And Two Evening Activities

The sails were fun because of the people, not the wind, which was very light. The first of them was with Lene, Sid and Jan from New Jersey and Linda and Joel from Long Island. All veterans. The lack of wind suited Joel, whose stomach is tender. We sailed out at speeds of one to three knots under full sail, to the eastern edge of the entrance to Manhasset Bay and then motored back, via the King's Point Channel, four hours. Dinner at the Club was disappointing. I like the food there, including my bay scallops and onion rings that night. Everyone else complained, mostly about the food being overcooked. Our caterer was betrayed by the cook she had working that day, Lene's burger was not medium toward rare but extra well done - dark brown inside and black outside!
The final sail, what with the Old Salts on Wednesday being rained out, was with Bennett and Mike, who are Old Salts. The purpose of the day was to get our dinks and outboards off our boats' davits and stored for the winter. In my case, with the RIB, the boat and outboard are safely ashore but more work is required on each. When the work was completed we sailed for almost two hours, with the same lousy wind as noted above. We zig-zagged in Eastchester Bay, looking for wind and did not get further than .6 miles from the mooring. The interesting thing was that Bennett had to be ashore by a certain time so we put him off ILENE onto the launch near the dock underway, sailing at almost three knots, before heading out to the mooring to tie up for the day.

The evening activities were a dinner and theater date with Bennett and Harriet, and a unique lecture.

 I belong to clubfreetime.org. It is a wonderful service for New Yorkers who like to go out in the evenings to learn and enjoy. For $20.00 per year you get a password. The internet then displays a variety of things to do: theater, concerts, art gallery openings, walks, lectures and other events that are either free or cost $5.  I go out to events that I learn about through this website about twice a week. Most of the events are interesting though not all of them, but I always get my money's worth.
But this event was different. It screamed out to me: GO! A lecture, illustrated with slides, at the South Street Seaport Museum by Peggy Garan about "The Seafaring Cats of Gotham and The Men Who Loved Them". Her website, hatchingcatNYC.com, has many stories involving all sorts of animals since early in 2013.

Her methodology is to search in the New York Times electronic morgue for "cat". She said that the editors mostly in the decades 1890 to 1930, had a thing about cats. Once she finds a story she checks other media to flesh it out and looks up information about the ship involved, the docks it stayed at and the men who loved the cat in question, etc. She told us that this was an era when a lot of cruelty toward animals was sadly tolerated. The ASPCA was in operation but its focus was on horses, not the smaller animals. Her book, "The Cat Men of Gotham; Tales of Feline Friendships in Old New York" tells of 42 cats, in nine chapters. Her interesting and well presented lecture told of seven cats. Seafaring cats are an old phenomenon, both to provide protection against rats and mice eating the provisions and lines and because the sailors got lonely.
One example was the cat of the SS Carpathian -- the ship that in 1912 rescued the survivors from the Titanic.  Captain Rostron was given many honors for his brave efforts, and two ladies gave him a black cat he named Captain who sailed with him, but not on Carpathian's final torpedo-ending voyage in 1918. Tom, was the sole feline survivor of the three cats aboard the USS Maine when it exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898.
Lene and I had seen a single photo of a cat aboard a Skandinavian naval vessel in the Lunenberg Maritime Museum but I had not known that the practice was common. This summer I read "The King's Commission" by Dewey Lambden, (an R rated Hornblower type story) in which the lovable, crusty Captain of a warship in 1791 kept a dozen cats, one of which saved the day for the hero, Alan Lewrie.
I remembered a book that I loved when I was in elementary school: "Brave Tales of Real Dogs", by Eleanor Fairchild Pease, published in 1945. The difference was that the brave dogs of the book rescued people: in Alaska, Lassie, St. Bernards, etc.,  while Ms. Gavan's cats were largely the object of rescue by humans, specifically men.
I spoke with Ms. Gavan and several cat loving audience members before the lecture about our brace of sea cats and showed them pictures of Alfie and Witty aboard.
Few activities are as perfectly located at the intersection of four of my interests, educational experiences, the sea, New York and cats. Thanks, Peggy!