Captain Boo

Oh Captain, My Captain
The Dockmaster of D Dock at the Key West Marina
Robert DeVito
May 14, 2026
Captain Boo was a Maine C**n tuxedo rescue who held the dockmaster post on D Dock at the Key West Marina for seventeen years. He treated yacht captains and homeless guys in rusty dinghies the same. He let the green herons fish next to the boat without bothering them. He calibrated his position to the line of shade coming off the dock pilings like a sundial running in reverse. The Captain had a page, a campaign mailbox, and write-in votes in the last mayoral election under the slogan Don’t Give A S**t. He died Tuesday at 8:40 PM Eastern, after watching the cruise boats come in one last time.

(Photos by the author, and if you don’t like cat photos, it’s time to move on to another story)

The Florida Keys SPCA found him a home with my friends Gary and Bobbie. Gary’s father was John Ek, the military knife maker whose blades sat on the desks of American presidents and went to war with the men who carried them. Gary retired to a houseboat on D Dock with Bobbie and a rescue cat from a litter at the local shelter. The houseboat had its own gravity. The cat became its center.

He was a big one even by Maine C**n standards. The ruff went all the way around. The white starburst on the chest, the white paws, the long thick tail he carried like a small flag. The eyes were yellow with the slight green that came up in certain light. He had a tag on the collar that said Captain Boo in case anyone needed proof. They rarely did. Everyone at the marina knew him by sight and most knew him by name.

He worked the dock. People think cats sit. He sat, but the sitting was the work. He had figured out the dock the way a fisherman figures out a piece of water. He knew where the shade went and he moved with it. The pilings made narrow shadow lines that traveled across the planks as the sun crossed, and he used them. In summer he tucked his head into the cool stripe and let the rest of him heat in the gold. In winter he sat in the open and took the whole sun. He had been on it long enough to know.

He coexisted with the green herons. Any other cat would have lunged or stalked. He watched them fish from a few feet away and the herons got used to him. The dock was his territory but the birds were welcome on it. He had reached some kind of arrangement with them that did not require negotiation.

Tourists came back year after year. They would walk down D Dock specifically to find him. He would let them pet him. He would slow-blink them. He would acknowledge them and then go back to whatever he had been doing. He did not fawn and he did not withdraw. He registered that the human was real and worth a moment, and the moment was enough. Most people do not get acknowledged like that, even by other people. He gave it to everyone who came down the dock.

I have known a lot of cats in sixty years. I owned several. I was friends with many more. None of them were like the Captain.

After my last divorce, when I moved back to Key West for the second or third time, I was living rough. Gary and Bobbie’s houseboat was an oasis. They are the kind of friends who let you come without questions. Their dock was where I went in the mornings to breathe before the day started. The Captain was always there. He would be in his spot. He would scoot over slightly so I could sit next to him. We would sit. The boats would come and go. The herons would work the water beside us. The sun would do what the sun does on D Dock in the early hours, which is to fill the marina with that particular Key West light that makes the whole place feel like it is being remembered while it is still happening.

I had been studying Buddhism by then for over thirty years. I had read the texts. I had sat with teachers. I knew the technical name for what the cat was doing on the dock. The traditions I had been reading called it equanimity, the steady non-discriminating attention that meets each being and each moment with the same quality of presence. The texts said it was one of the higher attainments and that most practitioners spend lifetimes trying to develop it.

The cat had it by default. He had nothing in the way of it. He sat with me through some of the worst mornings of my life and never once needed me to be anything other than what I was. He sat the same way for everyone else. Who is to say he was not the better meditator of the two of us. Some mornings I left the dock feeling like I had received a teaching I could not name and did not need to.

Years later, I was wearing a Tibetan shirt and the Captain was outside the houseboat banging on the glass demanding to come in for the air conditioning. I took a photograph through the door. When I looked at it later I saw that the reflection of the syllable HUNG from my shirt had landed on his forehead in the exact iconographic position where Tibetan thangka painters place the seed syllable of the wisdom mind on a deity image. HUNG is the syllable that closes the Vajra Guru mantra. It is the syllable that seals Padmasambhava practices. It is the syllable I have been working with for years and that the monk on the street in the town I am writing this from taught me to use in the Seven Line Prayer not three weeks ago.

I am not going to tell you what the photograph means. I have it. I am sitting with it. Make of it what you will.

Hermann Hesse ends Siddhartha with the ferryman Vasudeva, who has spent decades at one river, watching the water pass. The river teaches him by being a river. The watching is the practice. The man becomes what the watching produces in a being who is paying attention. At the end of the novel Vasudeva finishes his shift at the river and goes into the forest to die, having completed something that did not require explanation.

Captain Boo sat on D Dock for seventeen years and watched boats come in and boats go out and the sun cross and the tide rise and fall and the herons work the shallows and the tourists arrive and leave and the regulars age alongside him. He watched the fifty-million-dollar yacht owner and he watched the homeless guy from Christmas Tree Island heading back to his tent in a dinghy held together by hope. He gave them the same look. He let them pet him with the same patience. He did not adjust the quality of his attention based on who was approaching.

This is not a metaphor. This is a thing he did, every day, for seventeen years, in the same spot.

He had a sister. Her name is Sachita. They were separated as kittens at the Humane Society and adopted into different households. A Cuban couple in Key West had her for years before anyone made the connection. Two years ago they brought her down to the dock to meet him. The photograph of them sitting next to each other in the same posture with the same matched white starbursts on their chests is one of the small graces of his life. They had one afternoon. Sachita is still in town. She is carrying whatever she carries of him in her cat way.

He had been slowing down this year. He still came out for sunset. He was always going to come out for sunset. Tuesday evening he went to his spot. The cruise boats were coming in. The sky was doing what the sky does in Key West in the last hour. He died there at 8:40 PM Eastern with no drama and no pain, on the planks he had held for seventeen years, in the gold light he had calibrated his whole adult life to use correctly.

He was unapologetically a cat. He yawned and showed his teeth. He napped through hurricane warnings. He inspected unfamiliar bicycles with the appropriate dockmaster suspicion. He demanded air conditioning by banging on the glass. He hunted small things in his younger years before he made his arrangement with the herons. He was cat all the way down. The Maine C**n in him explained some of what he was. The rest was just him.

He was also one of the great teachers I have known. I am putting that in print because it is true and because the people who knew him will recognize it the moment they read it and the people who did not will have to take my word for it. I have known a lot of cats. None of them were like the Captain. Period point blank.

Rest easy, Captain. The dock is yours. The boats are still coming in.

Captain Boo, beloved son of Gary W. Ek and Bobbie Meck, Maine C**n tuxedo, Florida Keys SPCA rescue, Dockmaster of D Dock, Florida Keys SPCA mascot, write-in candidate for Mayor of Key West, ambassador to thousands, friend to the herons, teacher to at least one struggling guitar player who came to the dock to breathe. 2008 to 2025.
Seventeen years on watch. Don’t give a s**t.

- Bobby DeVito