Cruising Cats: How it Began (long)

How it began

When Jim & I moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1994, to a house on a
canal, it dawned on us that with the right boat, we could leave our dock
and go just about any place in the world.

Jim's dream would be to do just that, but that is way too much water for
me. Besides, I wouldn't even think of it in anything smaller than a
cruise ship, which would not fit behind the house and was way out of our
budget, anyway.

And, so we compromised and began saving and planning to move onto a boat
we could afford and travel via the intracoastal waterway (ICW) along the
Gulf and Eastern coasts of the United States, into the Great Lakes and
Canada via the available canal systems. We would exit Lake Michigan at
Chicago and take the inland waterways through the U.S. to return to the
Gulf Coast at Mobile, Alabama.

In 2000, we found and purchased a 38-ft trawler that was built in 1984
in Taiwan. It is big enough to live on and small enough for two people
to handle. Appropriately, it came with the name "Genesis," and it would
be the beginning of a new way of life for us.

We spent the next few years fixing up Genesis and learning how to handle
it. The rocking we would do in our retirement would be on the deck of a
boat, not on a chair on a porch.

Several circumstances came together to convince us that we should begin
our journey early in 2006. We have had so much time apart in the past
because of Jim's work, and now that he retired, so did I. We did not
want to hesitate and lose this opportunity to do this together.

Our family, however, includes two middle-aged cats, Cinder and Rosie.
We were concerned about how they would adapt to liveaboard life. We
debated the difficult choice of having someone foster them for what
would be as long as two years, or taking them with us.

Meanwhile, we spent the last six or so months downsizing from a nearly
2200 square-foot house to a 10'x5' storage unit and our boat.

And, Rosie and Cinder would come with us.

Annie, former slave and now crew to Cinder and Rosie