Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: This card is kind of messy, even in the printing process – the scribbles and whatnot making it even more tatty over time. (Did someone nibble on the edges of the neg before printing?) However, there’s something appealing about these two boat kitties, their images printed together. Homemade looking, but loved enough to have been stored away somewhere all these years. The one on the left looks like quite the man around town and the one on the right very dignified and in charge.

As you may know, I have expressed my ambivalence about cats at sea (it never seems to end well for them), but let’s face it, even on this blog, it is a sort of a genre. (See also, Kitty Rescue at Sea, Tom the Fire Boat Cat and Sporty among others!) While I may express some unease about cats on boats, they seem to frequent them and even enjoy them. When you consider how little cats like water this seems like an odd choice. Perhaps it is the potential for the consumption of fish?

Growing up on the waterfront in New Jersey, I had a huge fat orange tabby named Pumpkin. Pumpkin was the size of a small dog, adored me and had a bad tendency to bite most other people – usually after inviting them to rub his fluffy striped tummy. We would warn people, but they often didn’t believe us or move away fast enough. More to the point, over time Pumpkin had figured out that at certain times of the day he could jump from our floating dock to the sailboat we kept moored there. Evidently he discovered that tiny fish could be found on the deck which he would happily consume. He would then have to wait for the tide to swing the boat back to the dock so he could get off.  (I am unclear if these fish landed on the deck jumping from the water, or if the seagulls, which routinely dropped their oyster shells on the deck and dock to break them, were also responsible for the fishy build up.) While not seafaring, Pumpkin was, in his own way, one in a long line of maritime kitties.