Dorothy came into the boat and said "Guess who's here". I looked out, and there on the transient dock was MV Kwakatu, with it's unmistakable Diesel Duck 462 lines and "dog poop" colors. Hey, don't look at me; it was the Hai Zhu Ma boatyard workers who named her that. DavidEllis had her own boatyard nickname: as hull #2 she was "the practice boat".

We haven't seen Kwakatu since that late February 2008, 0300 morning in south central Philippines (east of Cebu), when she sailed away from our overnight raft-up on a big tug, headed SE to the Hinatuan Passage and eastbound across the Pacific with David (the owner) and his crew Jarmo the Giant Finn and Dick Towel, Hero At Large.

We met David & Jamie at the Seahorse Boatyard while boat DavidEllis and Kwakatu were under construction. They were hull #4. But as we got down towards the end of DE's construction, #3 John & Jerry Milici's boat Peking was already shipped, while Kwakatu and DE were completed more or less together, David & Jamie, Dorothy & I living aboard at the finishing dock in the Seahorse boatyard, May thru September '06.

We explored Hong Kong, Macau and Beijing together; we lived on Row 1, Aberdeen Typhoon Shelter, a Hong Kong party junk E*Trade, between us, facing towards Jumbo's floating restaurant. We had our first Thanksgiving and Christmas aboard together, carried a roast turkey from DE across E*Trade's deck to Kwakatu. We made our first crossing in our Diesel Ducks together, March '07, four days Hong Kong to Subic Bay PI. We explored Subic and Olongapo, worked the kinks out of our boats, and made day trips out of Subic up to Silangen.

DE needed more work initially than Kwakatu and while we stayed in Subic, Kwak went south along western PI to Kota Kinabalu (Borneo/Malaysia) and thence to Singapore (with our friends Craig & Anne crewing), and later thru the Straits of Malaka up to Langkawi (NW Malaysia). They returned to Subic in early '08 and prepared to head east across the Pacific, home to the USA.

Jamie didn't make the Pacific crossing, but we accompanied Kwakatu and crew the first part of the run thru PI, until the morning we separated near Cebu. Kwakatu went from PI to Palau to Ponhpei (FSM) -- spent 3 weeks on a reef there, but that's another story -- to Majuro (Marshall Islands)' Hawaii and Seattle. If that route sounds déjà vu, it should as that is the route Shearwater took last summer which I crewed to Hawaii. David and Jamie did a summer up the Inside Passage to AK, then down the Pacific Coast, thru the Panama Canal, eastbound thru the Caribbean and up the east coast to their home port in Connecticut.

We have great memories of our adventures with David, Jamie and Kwakatu, whether on the water, in the Hong Kong MTR or the dining room of the Posada de Mong Ha and it was bittersweet to see the dog-poop boat there at the dock. Real life intervened and Kwakatu was sold three years ago. The new owners changed the name to Luck Dragon; they seem very nice folks and we wish them the very best with her. The boat looks in great shape. We miss our friends.