Police Boarded an Abandoned Sailboat. There Were No People, and Sixty Cats.

On the sixth of August, the marine unit of the Tacoma Police Department went out to a forty-foot sailboat anchored off Owens Beach. It was a welfare check, the routine kind: someone had noticed a boat that did not look well kept, and officers went to see who was aboard and how they were doing.

Nobody was aboard. "They boarded the boat and found no humans on it," Officer Shelbie Boyd told KUOW, "but it was full of cats." A department spokesperson later reached for the only comparison that fits a derelict boat crawling with cats and no crew: it looked, they said, like a Studio Ghibli movie.

Cookie · Editor-in-chief

Sixty cats, a boat, and no humans. I want to be clear that this is my retirement plan.

Nora · Adoption desk

It took them six days to get everyone off.

Cookie · Editor-in-chief

Because nobody wanted to leave. Obviously.

It took until the twelfth. Cats came out of lockers, off bunks and from behind panels, a few at a time, and the count reached sixty. All of them went to the Humane Society for Tacoma and Pierce County.

What the department will not do is call it finished. "While we believe we have safely removed all of the cats from the boat, as any cat owner knows, cats are exceptionally good at hiding," they wrote, and said they would keep going back under the search warrant they are working from. This is an active criminal case, which is also why they are asking people not to board the vessel.

They did ask for one thing, though. If you are walking the paths at Owens Beach and you see a cat on that sailboat, photograph it, note the date, time and where you were standing, and email the lot to animalcontrol@tacoma.gov.

Which leaves the last word to whoever runs their page, and they earned it: "For now, we'll keep checking the boat because when it comes to cats, apparently you can never be too purr-sistent."