Free Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog by Emma Pearse

tail in triple time when she realized that Bridget had come home to pick her up.
    â€œCome on, girl! We’re going on the boat!” Bridget yelled, clapping her hands, excited as if it was she who was going out on the boat for the first time, not Sophie. She picked up Sophie’s front paws and the two did a little dance, then they jogged down the driveway back to the car and Bridget drove back to the marina with Sophie in the front passenger seat, tongue out. Bridget walked an exuberant Sophie on her lead to the lockedmarina gate. As Bridget swiped the entry card, Sophie could not be contained. She could see Jan on the deck of
Honey May
three rows down and she bolted, ripping her lead from Bridget’s grip. She galloped down the ramp, ears back, lead flying out behind her. Jan looked up from where she was fussing about on deck to see Sophie with her tongue flapping out bounding towards her, and Bridget in shorts and sunglasses bouncing on her nose, running behind crying, “I can’t hold her!”
    Jan flung her arms out wide and yelled, “Sophie Tucker!”
    As Sophie rounded the corner of the deck to
Honey May
, she skidded, her paws straightening out, readying for the jump into and beyond Jan’s arms. “I was clapping and she was coming towards me excited as anything,” Jan gleefully remembers. “She was just so happy to be there. It was fantastic.”
    As Dave steered the boat out of the harbor, leaving the coal ships of Mackay behind for the island-scattered blue ocean, Sophie stood by Jan and Bridget, tongue lolling, her whole rump wagging, looking around and back at them, as if to say,
look, there’s the ocean!
After years of larking and splashing about in the shallows, now here she was, adventuring much farther than her beloved beach. Delighted to be with her family on a new adventure, she was hungrily lapping up the sensation of spray on her face, and fierce wind through her ears.
    For the Griffiths, emerging from the headlands withthe wake of the boat spreading and boiling was always the first thrill on their boating trips. It was the moment when the industrial shoreline of Mackay gave way to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which has been referred to as “the oceanic equivalent of the Amazon rainforest.” The neck of the Mackay Marina opens out to the wide ocean, which even on rough days is layered with glassy blues, and the most southern of the islands comes into view. People in Mackay try to knock off work at four in the afternoon so they can mess around on jet skis, kayaks and boats, in order to spend their weekends in the thick of the marine wilderness on their doorstep. It takes about an hour or so to boat to a smattering of primitive islands, including St. Bees and Keswick, which are part of the South Cumberland Islands, south of the Whitsundays. These islands are not littered with catered resorts, but instead are barely touched pockets of land with just a handful of dwellings, perhaps a picnic area, and thickets of tropical plant life to lie and snooze under.
    â€œWhen you’re out there, something happens that just makes you go, ‘wow,’” Jan says. Sophie seemed to appreciate it, too. As Dave pushed up
Honey May
’s speed and the motor roared, Sophie started panting and raised her nose high into the air, seemingly thrilled to be included in the newest family adventure.
    Honey May
was small for a motor cruiser and required her crew to be quite cautious while on board, especially when the boat was moving. Dave’s rule was thatpassengers decided where they wanted to be—at the front, the back or up on the flybridge with the driver—before they left the marina, so there was not too much moving back and forth while the boat was in motion. The sides of the boat were very narrow, and getting from the bow to the stern required a walking-sideways maneuver while holding tight onto the thin metal railing. The front of the boat