After multiple rounds of obedience classes, Yankee remained an independent soul. Even at an advanced age, our Rotweiler/pointer mix could chase a deer for miles or run off with a pack of coyotes until she got hungry. “Stubborn” is what her obedience trainer called her.
“Some dogs are like that,” shrugged her veterinarian. “It’s their nature. They never change. Stop trying.”
So…we learned to love her for her quirkiness and our unusual, shared history.
As it turned out, Yankee had an uncommon talent. We had gotten her as a rescue puppy in Florida and immediately moved her aboard our family’s wooden schooner to live with us. I used the schooner SARAH ABBOT each summer as a research vessel for a marine science program for Phillips Academy/Andover where I was teaching. During my sabbatical in 1985-86, Yankee sailed to the Bahamas and back to New England with me, my first wife Marilyn, and my older son Noah.
Yankee quickly learned how to make herself comfortable and take care of her business during months at sea. From her first day aboard, she decided it was her job to protect the schooner from all manner of boats and marine life that approached us at sea. With her rugged Rotty looks and deep bark, she proved to be an effective deterrent to thieves, drug smugglers, and pirates in the remote islands of the Bahamas. She especially loved barking enthusiastically at the porpoises that swam in our bow wave.
Back in New England after the sabbatical afloat, I took Yankee to sea in the schooner during its summer work as a research vessel carrying six teenage students and their marine scientist/teacher on two-week cruises to study whales off the Massachusetts coast. Finding whales on a blank, vast, and sometimes raucous ocean has it challenges, but Yankee became my invaluable ally. Her infatuation with dolphins transferred to whales. Even from miles away, she could smell their stale, fishy breath when they surfaced.
When the boat was offshore, she would curl up and nap for hours or even days on the cockpit sole or in the main saloon. But when she smelled whales, her head would rise off her paws and she would scramble onto the foredeck and scan the sea on high alert. My crews learned to watch her until her head stopped scanning and she began to point in a single direction. Inevitably, her eyes would become focused on a cloud of small birds know as Wilson’s Storm Petrels wheeling in the air above the waves. Once we saw the birds, we knew that within minutes we would see humpback or fin whales break the surface beneath the birds, usually in a feeding frenzy.
In eleven years of seafaring, Yankee never failed her crews. She was a born whale hunter. It was as if she was on a mission to find Moby Dick. As New England fishermen say when something or someone proves to be extraordinary at sea, Yankee was “finest kind.” I was her nature.
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