Boatyard Dogs

For nearly thirty years, Maine's premier boating magazine Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors has published a regular column called Boatyard Dogs about dogs and the nautical life. This delightful book gathers the best of the column into a single volume that makes a wonderful gift for anyone who loves dogs--and boats.

This book is a collection of short stories about water-related happenings with pets, written by their owners and contributed for publication in Wet Pets to help support the Camden-Rockport Animal Rescue League (CRARL) and its no-kill shelter in Rockport, Maine. All proceeds from the sale of the book will go to CRARL. The editors of the volume are volunteers, each with writing and publishing experience. Most of the 50 stories in the collection include photographs of the subjects described. Animal lovers everywhere will be drawn to these recollections of watery adventures with beloved pets. Those passionate about sailing will be rewarded with images of boats, sea, and shore. Children and adults alike will appreciate these tales of cats, dogs, and ducks and the glimpes they provide into the lives of their people companions. This project reflects volunteerism at its best. It is a tribute to all who care about animals. It ensures that the pets of the contributing authors will be held in loving memory into the future. Most importantly, these stories will help to support shelter animals until they can be adopted into loving homes.

A family with wanderlust, a sailboat to carry them across oceans, and an 11-pound dog to watch over them… These are the elements of this delightful memoir of adventurous living. Young newlyweds Peter and Dorothy Muilenburg found their way from New Hampshire to the Virgin Islands. He had been a civil rights Freedom Fighter, jailed in Mississippi while protesting racial injustice. In St. John, she founded the Pine Peace School. They both taught. On an East End beach, he built a sailboat strong enough to take them anywhere, and they put to sea with their two young sons. But their crew was not yet complete. Santos, a schipperke, came to them as a tiny puppy and sailed with them all his life—75,000 deep-sea miles—four times across the Atlantic, crisscrossing the Caribbean, coasting the U.S. eastern seaboard, exploring the Med, ranging up African rivers. A lightning rod for trouble, he survived a kidnapping, hurricanes, raging surf, being lost overboard at sea, and was twice given up for dead. And he watched over his family with fierce and abiding devotion. If you want to see the world—really see it—go by sailboat. And if you want to absorb the world through every pore, take a venturesome dog as your guide. The bright spirit named Santos became a legend to millions of readers through the pages of SAIL and Reader’s Digest magazines. Now Peter Muilenburg—a wise and observant chronicler with a true wanderer’s desire to engage the world on authentic terms—has written this captivating story of familial love and adventure, unforgettable people and places, and an amazing schipperke who has sailed right into the sea dog hall of fame.

This is the remarkable story of one of the Second World War's most unusual animal heroes - a 14-stone St Bernard dog who became global mascot for the Royal Norwegian Forces and a symbol of freedom and inspiration for Allied troops throughout Europe. From a happy and carefree puppyhood spent as a family pet in the Norwegian fishing town of Honningsvag, the gentle giant Bamse followed his master at the outbreak of the war to become a registered crew member of the mine-sweeper Thorodd. Often donning his own steel helmet as he took his place in the Thorodd's bow gun turret, Bamse cut an impressive figure and made a huge contribution to the morale of the crew, and he gallantly saved the lives of two of them. After Norway fell to the Germans in 1940, the Thorodd operated from Dundee and Montrose, where Bamse became a well-known and much-loved figure, shepherding the Thorodd's crew-members back to the boat at pub closing time, travelling on the local buses, breaking up fights and even taking part in football matches. Mourned both by locals and Norwegians when he died in 1944, Bamse's memory has been kept alive both in Norway, where he is still regarded as a national hero, and in Montrose, where a larger-than-life statue of him was unveiled in 2006 by HRH Prince Andrew. Written from extensive source material and eyewitness accounts, Sea Dog Bamse is a fitting tribute to the extraordinary life of an extraordinary dog.

It has come. With Arznel free and vast animal migrations sweeping across the globe, the war to save Mother Earth from the throes of man is underway. In the midst of the chaos, where animals have become united and humans divided, Dreamer the fox and his motley companions are on their way to South America aboard their makeshift vessel, The Evergreen, pursued all the way by the forces of Richard Bromwell and facing storms, sharks, seasickness, and harrowing moral questions. Meanwhile, the once-pampered house petsPatch, Hero, Chief, and Majorhave joined the struggle, leaving behind the lives they once knew and fomenting the worlds farm animals into action. How will the friends fare in environments theyve never knownat sea, in battle? And how will mankind react to a crisis it caused but never saw coming?

In 1807, a young, Philadelphia woman of special gifts is accused by the religious authorities of practicing the black arts. Although the investigators can find no evidence that she has ever used her talents to harm anyone, they proceed to attempt to apprehend her to stand trial. She anticipates them – which is her way – and flees to the frontier which, in 1807, is the sleepy fishing village of Erie, Pennsylvania. It is now five years later. 1812. The sleepy fishing village of 400 souls finds itself on the front lines of a war against the British Empire. Among them walks a young woman of special gifts. The Brits have no idea what they are up against!

Booted out of school for trying to set fire to a teacher’s desk, Graham Taylor became a roadie for the Sex Pistols and other punk rock bands. It’s unlikely that someone savoring a life of sex, drugs, and rock music would end up on a police force, but it happened. After a decade on the force, Taylor was attacked and beaten, and his injuries forced him out of service. So Taylor topped one surprise twist in his life with another: he became an Anglican priest. Assigned to a church on the northeast coast of England, Taylor delved into the fascinating history of the region—tales of smugglers, storms at sea and people lost out on the moors. This curiosity would propel him in yet another new direction, as the landscape started to inspire him with ideas for settings and stories of his own. When he gave a speech about his concern over a growing occult presence in children’s literature, someone asked Taylor why he didn’t write a children’s book himself. The seed was planted, and soon Taylor was hard at work on Shadowmancer, a breathtaking tale of the battle between good and evil. It was a safe bet that when Taylor sold his motorcycle to print his first novel, the self-published book would sell only to friends and relatives. But once again, Taylor’s course roared away from the predictable. Shadowmancer rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. But then, what had been predictable about Taylor’s life? Laced with humor and filled with incredible twists and turns, the life story of G. P. Taylor is equal to the plot of any one of his bestselling novels. This entertaining, inspiring, and engaging autobiography is a book you won’t want to put down.