Cost of Bringing a Cat to Australia

The ugly numbers are below.  If you bring the cat in by boat you have 2 choices:

(a) keep the boat at anchor or on a mooring always while in Australia. Boat is never allowed to go to a marina. Quarantine officers will regularly check out the boat to see if kitty is aboard AND boat is locked up with hatches closed if you are not aboard.. They don't say how regularly, but maybe 1 visit / week or so.  At $180/hr, it wouldn't take long for costs to mount up... And it might be nice to visit a marina or haulout sometime.

(b) put cat in quarantine upon arrival. Only East Coast quarantine station is in Sydney so you might have to make arrangements to get the cat there at hideous extra cost. If you visit some Pacific Islands (I think Cook I and Samoa are on the 'bad' country list,) quarantine time increases to 60 days.  If you are like us and left from Mexico, you have to have the cat rabies vaxed and tested in the US, a not inconsiderable hassle. They won't accept Mexican rabies test results.  Heck they wouldn't accept Canadian rabies test results. The blood went to a US lab.

So we opted to send Cat back to Canada to live with my parents for 11 months, and did paperwork and testing from there, and flew him to Sydney where he was in solitary for 30 days. I flew from Brisbane to Sydney at an unspeakable hour to get him.  Hope you like your cat Maia and Diane!

Fly cat PV to Vancouver	100
Vet Fees, Canada, govt vet	379
Vet Fees, Canada, private vet	339
Air Canada Cargo, Vancouver to Sydney	400
AQIS
Lodgement Fee	85
Assement Fee	240
Quarantine Entry	15
Document Clearance	40
Vet Exam	80
Kennel	870
	2448
Optional Extras
Taxis, to/from Brisbane airport	100
Flight to/from Sydney	213
Cat cargo fee, Sydney to Brisbane	55
Rental car, fuel, meals	100
Grande Total	2916

Charlie the Cat Goes Home

 We knew this day was coming, but for Maia it hit far sooner than she would like. Charlie the cat is heading home to Canada. We would love to cruise through the South Pacific to Australia with him aboard, because although he had a shaky start he really is an excellent boat cat. But the more we've looked into quarantine requirements for Oz, the clearer it's become that bringing a cat in by sea is fraught with trouble.
 
So, with the horror stories mounting (of unacceptable documents, six month quarantines and pets that were outright refused) and the success stories sounding more like horror stories (expensive, don't miss a single step in the process, be prepared for a long quarantine) we're taking the advice of other cruisers who have successfully imported their pets and sending him back to Canada.

 This puts Charlie in an approved country for the very important six month window prior to importing him--which means that if we follow the directions (far simpler in Canada) he'll fly to Oz with a shipping company the month before we arrive--and when we get there we'll just go pick him up out of quarantine.

as an FYI, this isn't his flight kennel, it's his little 'around town' kennel...

 It's a more, or less, simple solution to a complex problem. Although a bloody expensive solution. But Maia loves the little creature (as do we) and we're happy we have an option... So bye for now Charlie--we'll see you in November:(

A Cat Story

Travis in his prime

I noticed him first—a big orange cat, standing in the water, clearly hunting for fish. But it wasn't just his unique behaviour that caught my attention--almost fifteen years ago we adopted a tiny orange kitten from this very stretch of beach. An orange kitten that grew into a 30 lb cat and who sailed some 8,000 miles with us—having adventures, terrorizing our friends and fishing straight from the ocean, just like this cat.

I watched that orange cat for a while, then pointed him out to Maia, who was busy playing with friends. “He looks like Travis,” Maia told me. So I told her that Travis had been born just a few steps from this beach and that maybe we were looking at his great grand-nephew...

Maia then asked exactly where we had found Travis-- an animal who has grown to mythical proportions in her life, and who died over two years ago. So I walked her over to the little corner store across from the beach. When we went in, I explained to the man at the counter how fifteen years ago we had adopted a tiny orange kitten from the store's inner courtyard.

Life is filled with charming coincidences, and the story that came next may only seem special if you've loved and lost a pet. But the man told us he has had big orange toms from the same family for 30-years. And that the first tom was a huge wild one that he found on an isolated beach. He told us that he keeps the orange males, and gets new females from friends, and that every year, and in almost every litter there is one orange cat, and it's always huge, and it always knows how to fish.

The orange cat on the beach was his. And it was the great-grand nephew of our cat--because he remembered his wife had gave one of his cats away to sailors. The man was thrilled to hear how far Travis had traveled (much further than him), and how long he had lived, and he offered us the next orange kitten that came along—even though he doesn't normally give them away.

We don't need a kitten—and thankfully he didn't have one to give. But that urge—to laugh at the insane antics of a half-wild cat that doesn't know fear—came back with a pang. And as much as I think cats need to be spayed and neutered, I envied the man for knowing so many Travis's through the years...

Bird Watching

You and I might see the limitation, but Charlie just sees the possibility

wind

Finally have decent wind--12 knots just forward of the beam. Unfortunately the breeze came with sloppy washing machine waves of no specific direction. Charlie the cat and I have proved you can get seasick after being out for 3 days...

Yesterday we managed to bake zucchini bread and cook two nice meals (including awesome fish tacos). When we can, we cook from scratch at sea. Having a nice sit down meal together tends to punctuate the day in a really good way. Cooking and dishes are more effort, but it's worth it. Today our meals will come from tins--unless the seas smooth out between now and lunch, which is possible.

The wind came up around 10pm last night. For the first 4-5 hours the seas were flat. We watched through two watches as an impressive lightening storm grew ahead of us in the distance. I think it's the waves from that, combined with the waves from the wind we have that are churning up the waves.

We're making a steady 6 knots though and will be in some time tonight. The sun is shining and the air is so warm we've retired our blankets. Despite the slop, it feels good to be at sea.

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Waivers and Warnings

A few people have pointed out that I haven’t mentioned how Charlie and Maia are doing on the cursed-ship-Ceilydh (seriously, we are starting to wonder if someone has hexed us because all these breakdowns are not normal…)

As far as the sailing part of things, Charlie is fine. He’s a cat, and not that bright of one. He’s found his six or seven secure sea-berths and wedges himself in them when things get noisy. He comes out to be sick when things get rough – then after eight hours or so he feels better and wants to sit on the chart we’re using, or play.

Which is why we have Maia.
She only seems to get queasy if she insists on reading too much when we first start out. We’re thinking of banning books for the first hour or two and just listening to podcasts together. She’s recently discovered Stuart Mclean and the Vinyl Cafe (we think she identifies with Sam) so that might be an idea. Once Charlie is feeling better they tend to play together, forage for food and wander about.

Maia’s noticed that we’ve had quite a few things go wrong--but with no frame of reference I’m not sure she knows it’s not typical. She did surprise us by supplying our most recent guests with waivers.

Her home schooling program really encourages communication so she’s found a number of other ways to express how she’s feeling and doing. When a large rusty fishing boat moored on top of our engineless selves in Morro Bay and the Harbour Patrol needed us to move she was clear on how she felt. Because she posted it in a window where the harbour patrol (who was moving us to a safe place) could see it, she also got to express herself in a letter of apology.

A big reason for doing this trip now – was to have more time to spend together as a family. And while I’ve been home with Maia all her life I’ve also been working a lot for the past four years. The most startling thing to me has been to discover she’s eight – I mean, really discover it. Somehow she was still mostly four in my mind – this little person I could carry on my hip, who hung on my every word, who did what I asked with a minimum of protest. I’ve felt like I’ve been rediscovering her on this trip. She’s a neat person.

That alone has made it all worthwhile.

Family, errr, dinghy

We gave up our car a couple of weeks ago.
We’ve been carless before and relied on our bicycles for transportation, but this time we’ve sold those too. These days, other than our kayaks, our primary mode of transportation is by dingy. And seems how we’re rarely at a dock, our dingy is even more important than a car. We use it for sightseeing, visiting neighbouring boats, scouting out good places to picnic and go grocery shopping.
It’s a system that works pretty well, when you plan ahead.
It’s less than perfect when you find yourself anchored 8-miles from the nearest settlement and discover you have no cat food.
Seaside villages in Desolation Sound are well set up for boaters. The stores often have more dock space than land-based parking and are well stocked with appies and alcohol. What they don’t have are regular hours or easy anchorages. So when you’re 8-miles away, and you only travel at 8-miles an hour, the best option (after attempting to make something the cat would eat out of brown rice and tinned sardines) is to hop in the dingy (which goes twice as fast as the big boat) and head to the shops.

If you were headed to the corner store on an evening cat food run, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal. But when your outing takes you across two channels, past four uninhabited islands and up one sound - it’s called an expedition. It’s something you only do after unpacking three lockers and two cupboards (just in case there’s more cat food stashed somewhere you forgot), checking the weather report, listening to sea state reports, topping up fuel tanks, grabbing the handheld VHF, checking the chart for unmarked hazards and rocks, double checking that the dam cat won’t eat the glop you made, packing a light (just in case sunset happens before your return) and putting on your life jacket.It’s safe to assume that the cat is not the least bit impressed when you make an effort like this on his behalf. But I’m grateful that we went with a motor on the dingy this trip – it would have been a bitch to row all that way.

Cats Can Swim

Cats can swim.
But they don't like to.
Most do everything they can to avoid it.
But occasionally a cruising cat will fall overboard. Travis the cat fell in about 35 times before we stopped counting.
So far Charlie hasn't even gone near the edge. But we know that on some dark night a flying fish or a giant moth will lure him overboard.
We want him to know how to rescue himself when the time comes.
And while this may just look like a fun thing to do to a cat, it's really for his own good.