In June of 2008, I quit my job as a staff nurse in the Mental Health Services of the Roseburg, Oregon VA Medical Center. Five more months of employment would have seen me retired with a small pension, but work conditions, and the conditions of care for our veterans, had (IMHO) deteriorated to the point where I could no longer stomach the job. My wife Shirley had retired over a year earlier, so we put our property on the market and in June it sold. As we had pounded large chunks of disposable income into the mortgage, we ended up with enough equity to do something we had both dreamed about - to buy a sailboat to live aboard full-time.
After we left Roseburg, Oregon, we traveled east. We had been searching the Internet for some years to develop an idea of what sort of boat we would like, and had decided a catamaran would be our choice of sailing vessel. Our arrival on the East Coast signaled the start f our search for the boat we would purchase. We looked at boats with the help of a broker (Phil Berman, the owner of Multihull Company) from the Florida Keys to the Chesapeake Bay to Long Island Sound and New England. In November f 2008, we found a TPI Lagoon 37 in Daytona Beach, FL that we liked, and we purchased her.
She was built in 1995 by TPI in Rhode Island, reputedly a better manufacturer of the Lagoon 37 model than the French-built Lagoons. The boat had originally been named "Gwahir", but the fellow who owned her prior to our purchase had renamed her "Reference Point". Shirley and I wanted a name that would reflect the fact that she was a catamaran, and we batted some ideas around along with my stepmother Carolyn, during a visit with her. As my family comes from French-Canadian stock on both sides, and being a lover of puns and other wordplay, I decided that "chat", French for cat, would be fun as part of the name. "Chat" is pronounced "sha", but the feminine "chatte" - French for "she-cat" - is pronounced "shot". Carolyn suggested "Hot Chatte" (pronounced Hot Shot), and that is what we named her. A French-Canadian fellow we met just after we bought her advised us that in French, "chatte" was slang for another word, beginning with "p", used when speaking of cats (and other things.) So, when we had the graphics put on her stern as part of her documentation, we included a brush-stroke drawing of a cat "presenting" herself. What can I say?
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