Alexandre the Cat Meets a Purposeful Porpoise

Joah Helps Him Learn a Thing or Two About Getting Places in Life

Genevieve Jacobs Aug 26   ∙   Guest post

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Chapter One in a continuing series of adventures by the author, entirely true in spirit and partly true in fact. This is what you get when a sailor has turned into granma.

Alexandre the Seagoing Cat is born in the bilge of a boat at the RiverBend Marina in Florida. He is born wearing a black and white coat, like a man going to a fancy party in a tuxedo and being very grand. This isn’t really his style, at heart, but he goes with it. Because what else are you gonna do?

He dreams of the sailing the seven seas, but he is still just a little kitten. So he sets about learning all the seagoing cat skills he will someday need.

First, he practices prowling on the bouncy decks, and balancing on the bowsprit.

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Next, he practices swimming! He learns how to blow bubbles on his exhale and how to not snot up a bunch of water on his inhale.

After he dries off in the sunshine, he practices coiling lines to keep everything ship shape. This is lots of fun. Cat-kind really love playing with string. Maybe a little too much fun for a kitten! The charts for navigation are a little crunchy, but he sinks his little claws into them anyway.

One fine morning, he rolls out of his bunk with a strange feeling: All his 20 paw pads are tingling, and his whiskers feel sparkly.

“Today is the day! The time is ripe! I must go to sea!”

With a song in the air, Alexandre hoists the sails, hauls up his anchor, and sails out of the harbor.

To sea I go,
To see the world
With all my sails, wholly unfurled
On a fresh breeze that twirled
And a big sneeze my whiskers are curled
And more than a few little fleas!

All is going splendidly, until he loses sight or scent of land. Everything is blue, blue, blue! The horizon is a flat circle all around him on his little sailing vessel. He feels a little blue too.

“Now how will I know which way to go?” he wonders, feeling just a little seasick. He wishes he had studied the chart lessons a little more carefully.

But he has a full arm of bananas hanging from the boom, so he eats one. The fruit flies make a little cloud around his big long bunch of bananas. He says, “That’s okay, guys. We can share.” He doesn’t mind too much, they hardly take a bite! He could share with them all night!

Feeling a little better now, he remembers his friends—the fish and the birds and the turtles who had followed him from his homeport. They are all very experienced navigators, so he asks them for advice.

But they all have different ideas.

The birds says, “Go east to the Bahamas! Nice reefs there!”

The fish says, “Go north with the Gulf Stream! Sargasso seaweed floats there!”

The turtles say, “Go west to our hatchery in the Florida Keys!”

The barnacles clinging to his hull have no opinion at all. They just say, “Hey, we’ll stick with ya no matter what!”

This is all very tiring, so he curls up in his hammock for a nice nap.

When Alexandre wakes up, the moon and stars are shining on the sea. He feels like singing a song to ease his loneliness.

For I am forlorn,
Just a seagoing cat…with no destination
Wandering the waters, far from where I was born
Wondering where to go,
North, south, east, west, I am torn!”

Like always, the sun comes up in the east, and Alexandre decides to eat a good breakfast and give it a good think.

“Maybe I should turn around and go back home, back the way I came?”

This seems like a plan, so he pushes the tiller to starboard, all his sails flapping. His genny was gapping and the water was trickling alongside, and for a minute he wonders if he is choosing the right way.

But just as he calls out hard alee! and hauls in his lines to make a new course, up pops a new friend alongside. His name is Joah. Joah is a very clever, very handsome, very capable porpoise!

And Joah is a fun-loving fella, who makes a twirl up in the air, with dark smiling eyes and a most wonderful giggle and laugh, who stands on his tail and says, “Hey! Don’t worry! Don’t give up! I know the way to a sweet island bay where my papa lives! Follow me!”

I know the way to a sweet island bay
Where bananas and passion fruit grow
It’s not too far to go!
Hey, hey, hey! Come on!
Hip hip hurray! Let’s up up and away!”

So Alexandre, the slightly uncomfortable-in-a-tuxedo cat, smartly adjusts course to follow Joah, the fun-loving tail-twirling porpoise.

The sun sets again, and the moon and stars appear, and Joah (who can always swim much faster than Alexandre could sail, but Joah is very patient and kindly) kept circling back to sing songs and tell tales of his ocean travels and all the adventures that lay ahead of them.

Day after day, night after night, Alexandre sails on, with Joah the sleek, smart, clever dolphin leading the way.

Alexandre has plenty of time to study his charts and figure out how to read them. He discovers that Joah had the right idea all along.

Just when he is down to his last banana, Alexandre sees a little bump on the horizon far ahead of them. Sure enough, the bump grows bigger and darker as he keeps slowly sailing over the waves and waves and waves, and Joah cavorts in the waves and spins on his tail and makes Alexandre laugh and says, “Prepare to make landfall, captain!”

Sure enough, the bump turns into a bigger bump and then two bumps and then three bumps—green mountains!

Alexandre can smell the powdery sweet leaves of the trees, fruits and flowers and freshwater springs that tickled his whiskers and made him feel quite hungry. But he also can see white lines where the waves are breaking on the shore, and this made his tummy feel a little ooogy. He wonders if his boat would go crunchety-crunch on those reefs!

But Joah swims up in his wake and says, “Don’t be a silly cat! Look at your charts and your compass! Look at the colors of the water! Keep going, keep looking, and you’ll find the safe channel into port!”

Sure enough, as they draw closer, keeping just off the shore, coasting along the coast, as Alexandre has learned from his pilot books, the water shows many colors—yellow green for the shoals and shallows, black spots for the coral, and finally, a dark blue purple snaky stripe and a red and a green bouy marking the entrance.

Joah says, “There you go! That’s your way in!”

Alexandre carefully sails through the passage, finds a nice calm spot in the bay, drops his anchor, lowers his sails and furls them up tightly, as snug as a bug in a rug. When he is done with that, he just sighs with happiness. Joah cavorts around the hull until he must bid his farewell and go back out to sea, where he has lots and lots of things he must do.

“Thanks for keeping me company, buddy, Alexandre shouts. “I couldn’t have done it without you, Joah my friend!”

Joah laughs and sings out a hearty, “Hasta luego, amigo mio! Until we meet again!”

And they always do.

Author Genevieve Jacobs landed in Vermont in 1987 after a lifetime under sail. Besides being a regular Loose Cannon contributor, she is a long time professor of psychology, a mother and grandma, a psychotherapist and bricoleur. Currently, her work in progress is a book, “Jenny: A Night Sea Journey.” She recently launched her own Substack entitled Sea Stories.