ADRIAN MORGAN

CHARLOTTE WATTERS

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 Farewell, canine sailor cock his leg. The leak has never reappeared. Bran did not like bad weather, well who does? We would send him Bran was never quite a shipmate – but he was a true mate below and try and settle him in the leeward bunk, but he never got the

It could have been a metal mast, but Sally’s is wooden, hang of tacking. Instead he would stand below the built in Bristol by Noble in the 1980s. That early companionway, looking up beseechingly until Rona morning, at anchor in, luckily, a sea loch we had joined him, and together they would curl up under a almost to ourselves, it would not have mattered what the blanket until things settled down. And thus we voyaged mast had been made of, it would still have struck anyone throughout the West Coast, until the day he became too watching as odd to see a semi-naked man cocking his leg creaky to risk taking aboard. On the days I went to against it. check on Sally at her mooring, I would leave him ashore,

Bran, our pointer and companion for just a day under where he would sit on his haunches among the rocks, a 15 years, a master on the hill, was not a natural sea dog; lone brown dog gazing out to sea, until his master or rather he was happiest curled up in the cockpit, or returned. better still, bleaching his tan on deck. He would take a Bran is now gone and dog owners will understand keen interest in sea life, birds, dolphins, seals; especially what the loss of a companion of 15 years feels like. He seals which we are told are closely related to dogs. He was never what you might call a boaty dog, but he was would watch them for hours, and sometimes we worried willing to give anything a try, always the first aboard the he might, like a selkie returning to its kind, jump dinghy on the row out, and the first to leap ashore on overboard and, with a backward glance, disappear “He was our return, always I swear with an almost audible sigh of beneath the waves. never what relief. One time he swam out from the shore of a skerry in the Summer Isles archipelago to join a group of curious you might Above all he was willing to learn, and his training to the whistle was textbook reward and repeat. If he was seals. Fortunately he decided fairly quickly that he was call a boaty told to stay, and moved, he would be marched back until still a dog and not ready to join his kin who may well dog, but he he got it. Teaching by example, however, was not a have taken against a creature with four legs and a tail, no was willing method that worked with Bran, but that morning, rather matter how friendly. There was the time we woke to find him standing in to give than get dressed and go ashore, it was worth a try. And that was why anyone up that early would have seen me the dinghy, which was hanging by its painter a yard or anything cocking my leg against Sally’s mast, watched by a two astern. It was probably his way of telling us he was a try” bemused pointer.