In the summer, ship’s cat Beryl spends her time sprawled out on the boat’s sole, taking advantage of close proximity to the year-round cooling of the Pacific waters. This makes a lot of sense because typically summertime Pacific water temperatures are in the 60’s wherever we’ve been and winter temperatures much lower. Water in the 70’s beneath the keel is quite a rare situation aboard Mahdee.

In the winter, Beryl finds the sole a bit cool for her liking and she climbs to higher perches in the boat. The closer to the cabin overhead, the warmer it is of course. We have the old mainsail as a spare stored adjacent the main saloon in an area we call “the storage bed” because it does nothing but store various things for us. In theory, it IS a bed, but… Back to the sail! with all its bronze sail slides attached, weighs over 100 lbs and takes up quite a bit of space as well. We move it rarely since it takes both David and me both to get it to a new location in the boat. The top of the sail sits about 24″ below the overhead and it just so happens that a fan we have hanging high up in the galley behind the solid fuel stove, pushes air across the stovepipe and directly to the area where the spare mainsail resides. This is a prime warm spot.

This year, when it got cooler, Beryl began to hang out near the diesel bulkhead heater — the heater we usually run 24/7 if it’s cold but we’ve decided to not use this year. Instead, we’ve been keeping the solid fuel galley stove stoked with cleaner burning Anthracite from Pennsylvania. It only took her a few days to relocate to a better, warmer perch atop the spare mainsail. There she sits, hours on end, watching all the goings’ on aboard Mahdee.