Me and you and a dog named Boobee!

Who am I?

My name is Benedict Chin. A Malaysian by birth and for the last 24 years I have been calling the little city state of Singapore, home. I have been working in a corporate environment for more than 20 of those years. I was an executive director in a multi-national company for almost the last entire decade until a restructuring, which saw my retrenchment. That was almost 3 years ago.

And what did I do to help cope with something that drastic? Well, I bought a boat and moved from my high rise apartment to live on the boat with my partner in life (let’s just call her “The Admiral”) I will come back to the “why” in future writings but for now it will be too much details and too far a deviation from the core of our journey towards being sailors. Some journey it was as I was a typical corporate executive who was better at delivering presentation at senior management meeting than say topping up the water tanks on the boat or heavens forbid, berthing (parking) the boat alongside a marina finger pontoon.

BooBee the sailor dog (to be)!

It wasn’t until a few months after we have moved onto the boat that the thoughts of getting a dog to share in our adventures, entered our minds. Some criteria were eventually decided upon before we even started looking for a dog. The dog should not be a big dog as there is limited space on the boat. Our floating home is a 2003 Jeanneau 43 DS (a 43 foot sailboat). It has, I would guess, around 500 sq ft of living space. It would be less that the floor area of a 40 ft container. The width would be more or less the same as the container but the smaller and more pointed extremities at both ends make it much lesser a floor area than a 40 ft container.

The dog will have to serve some functions as a guard dog as well hence it shouldn’t be too small. Size does matter to some extent when it comes to a matter of deterrence. The thought of an “instant” adult dog through adoption was rather appealing as well.

So we went looking at the dog pounds for rescued dog to adopt. After a few days, spread over a couple of weekends we would have seen quite a few dogs but none came through as hot favorites. Oh, there was one which almost made it to this list however, she was adopted before we actually got to see her in the flesh.

At the last dog pound which we visited, we came across a skinny looking mongrel (a female) which warmed up to us by jumping up on me. In retrospect, I think she chose us rather than we chose her. Over the following week there was quite a bit of WhatApps messages going back and forth with the pound owner for information on “Bopit”! Yes that was her name. She was 2.5 years old at that point. The following weekend we adopted her.

Before she came to her new floating home, we have decided to call her by a different name. One that sounds a little similar to her existing name but a little easier off the tongue. “Bopit” has a hard edge to it so something a little rounder sounding like “Booby” may be better. So the name “BooBee” came to be.