We live in Toronto and have sailed on Lake Ontario and the Saint Lawrence River for 47 years—and we’ve always taken our cats with us, across three boats and three generations of cats. They won’t admit it, but we know they would rather be with us on the boat than home alone.

Our first sailor cat was Levi, and he was probably the most adventurous. We were in port at the Genesee Yacht Club in Rochester, New York, having a pre-dinner drink. Levi was walking around the deck, checking things out. All of a sudden, we heard a yelp and a splash. He had fallen in. I said to Gilles, “Jump in, jump in!” When Gilles tells the story, he says I tried to push him. Meanwhile, Levi swam over to the dock with a beautiful long stroke. We had never given him swimming lessons and are quite sure he had never been in the water before. Gilles scooped him up and brought him back onto the boat. He was furious with us, of course, since clearly, this was all our fault. This was not the most interesting part of the story, though. From that time on, whenever we anchored and swam off the boat, he would sit on deck and watch us very closely until we were back on board.

A few years later, we had two male cats, Picot and Minuit. They were probably the most astute sailors of all our cats. When it was rough, they knew to sleep low amidships on the leeward side to minimize the motion. By then, we had learned to put harnesses and leashes on them to avoid any “cat overboard” situation. Of course, they found another way to get into mischief. One weekend, we were docked at Toronto Island (in the city harbour). It was hot, so we left some screened portholes open. In the morning, we discovered that two screens had been pulled out and that Minuit was missing!

We thought he had fallen into the water and might have drowned. Someone told us that “you can’t drown a cat,” and we already knew they were good swimmers. We had to take the boat back to our own marina but plastered the island with posters. Someone called one day to say that they had seen a black cat with a white tip on the tail. We had not put the “white tip” on the posters, so then we knew that he was alive and that it was just a matter of finding him. For 24 days, we went to the island by ferry to look for him. Finally, we got a call from an American tourist who thought they had seen him and told us where. We went to that location and indeed found him—a little skinny and infested with fleas, but he was OK. He lived with us for another 10 years, so the experience didn’t shorten his life. The next thing we did was install air conditioning on the boat so that we wouldn’t have to leave portholes open at night anymore.

Fast-forward a few years, and we had three female cats, Lucie, Manouche, and Mommy. The girls were not as good sailors as the boys, although Manouche loved to sit on her pillow in the cockpit. They seemed more sensitive to motion and wouldn’t stay amidships, where the rocking was less obvious. To make things worse, the prevailing winds on Lake Ontario have changed to southwest. (In earlier years, the winds had been north or northwest.) With wind from the southwest, the waves build up and can be quite strong on the north side of the lake. As a result, we have had to curtail our sailing with the cats. We still like having time on the boat with them, so we navigate to the calm of Toronto Harbour before bringing the cats onboard.

We lost our beloved Manouche in November 2017 at the age of about 22. Since then, we persuaded a formerly feral male cat, Momo, to join our family. He just loves to be with us wherever we are and adapted to the boat quite quickly. We managed to have a vacation on the boat this summer, and nobody fell overboard or got lost. So sailing life goes on for the Fecteau humans and felines!

Gilles and Vicki Fecteau are longtime Vanguard Society and Augustus Club members. They live in Toronto, Ontario and love sailing, but not as much as they love helping animals.