CHARLOTTE WATTERS
Adrian Morgan
Farewell, canine sailor
bursting for a poo and would we please row him ashore, which we did and, as was his wont, then took his time, wandering about, sniffing the flowers, exploring the rocks, marking his new territory and finally, in his own time, as if to say “you kept me waiting; now it’s my turn...” House trained to a fault, he was also boat trained, up to a point. At night he would often leap up the companionway into the cockpit, creep around the sprayhood onto the side deck, where his scuttling on the non-slip sounded like a posse of land crabs had snuck aboard. The scratching would then stop, once, memorably, directly above the head of Rona’s bunk, at the corner of the coachroof which, of all the spots to have a pee, was probably the worst on account of a persistent leak that even Captain Tolley’s Creeping Crack Cure had failed to stem. And here it was that he had decided to cock his leg. The leak has never reappeared. Bran did not like bad weather, well who does? We would send him below and try and settle him in the leeward bunk, but he never got the hang of tacking. Instead he would stand below the companionway, looking up beseechingly until Rona joined him, and together they would curl up under a blanket until things settled down. And thus we voyaged throughout the West Coast, until the day he became too creaky to risk taking aboard. On the days I went to check on Sally at her mooring, I would leave him ashore, where he would sit on his haunches among the rocks, a lone brown dog gazing out to sea, until his master returned. Bran is now gone and dog owners will understand what the loss of a companion of 15 years feels like. He was never what you might call a boaty dog, but he was willing to give anything a try, always the first aboard the dinghy on the row out, and the first to leap ashore on our return, always I swear with an almost audible sigh of relief. Above all he was willing to learn, and his training to the whistle was textbook reward and repeat. If he was told to stay, and moved, he would be marched back until he got it. Teaching by example, however, was not a method that worked with Bran, but that morning, rather than get dressed and go ashore, it was worth a try. And that was why anyone up that early would have seen me cocking my leg against Sally’s mast, watched by a bemused pointer.
Bran was never quite a shipmate – but he was a true mate
I
t could have been a metal mast, but Sally’s is wooden, built in Bristol by Noble in the 1980s. That early morning, at anchor in, luckily, a sea loch we had almost to ourselves, it would not have mattered what the mast had been made of, it would still have struck anyone watching as odd to see a semi-naked man cocking his leg against it. Bran, our pointer and companion for just a day under 15 years, a master on the hill, was not a natural sea dog; or rather he was happiest curled up in the cockpit, or better still, bleaching his tan on deck. He would take a keen interest in sea life, birds, dolphins, seals; especially seals which we are told are closely related to dogs. He would watch them for hours, and sometimes we worried he might, like a selkie returning to its kind, jump overboard and, with a backward glance, disappear beneath the waves. One time he swam out from the shore of a skerry in the Summer Isles archipelago to join a group of curious seals. Fortunately he decided fairly quickly that he was still a dog and not ready to join his kin who may well have taken against a creature with four legs and a tail, no matter how friendly. There was the time we woke to find him standing in the dinghy, which was hanging by its painter a yard or two astern. It was probably his way of telling us he was
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CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021
“He was never what you might call a boaty dog, but he was willing to give anything a try”
