"It's an amazing story of a lot of people working together to save this puppy," said Evans Hoyt, captain of NCL's Pride of Aloha. "He's a very, very lucky dog."

To say that Snickers may be headed to the right place — landlocked Las Vegas — is an understatement. The tiny cocker spaniel defied all odds to make it to Aloha Tower yesterday morning amid great fanfare. He survived on an island where animals are thought of as either wild and fending for themselves, or food.

"When the original owners decided not to return to get Snickers and their pet macaw, officials from Christmas Island had sent word to Fanning Island that the pets could be destroyed," said Jack Joslin, a Las Vegas resident who contacted the Hawaiian Humane Society asking for help in trying to save the pets. "I've been told they don't even have a word for 'pet' on Fanning Island, but they were holding Snickers and Gulliver after they were shipwrecked until the family could return to get them. When I read they decided not to, I called the Humane Society in Hawai'i and told them I would do whatever I could to adopt them."

Joslin, who retired from the TV commercial business and moved to Las Vegas from Los Angeles recently, has been working to adopt Snickers and Gulliver, the macaw, since reading about their plight in the sailing magazine Latitude 38, which bills itself as "The West's Premier Sailing & Marine Magazine."

The timing of the article couldn't have been better. Joslin had just euthanized his longtime companion Tucker, a 15-year-old Border Collie he had found abandoned on the side of a road on a Navajo Indian reservation.

"It was very hard on me," Joslin said in a telephone interview. "And then I read about Snickers and Gulliver. ... Hopefully now that Snickers is famous we can work on getting Gulliver home, too."

As complicated as Snicker's plight has been, Gulliver's travels are even more complicated. Because the macaw is an endangered animal, the Hawaiian Humane Society told Joslin that Gulliver couldn't be brought back to Hawai'i because of customs and quarantine issues.

Joslin is working with a family on Fanning Island who took the bird in to get it back to the United States, but because the original owners didn't register it, the process is complicated.

For Snickers, who would have been two weeks old when the ordeal began, his fortunes changed when the Humane Society got involved. (Society officials only have an estimate of his age.)

The Humane Society worked with customs and quarantine officials, and when Hoyt told NCL offices that the Pride of Aloha would be happy to transport the puppy back to Honolulu, a flight to Las Vegas was the only obstacle. Joslin said the Humane Society arranged passage on a Hawaiian Airlines cargo flight to Los Angeles.

"My costs so far haven't been anything because of all the help and people involved," Joslin said. "All I have to do is get to Los Angeles to get Snickers. Then it's just a matter of getting Gulliver home."

According to a Latitude 38 Jan. 7 article, the pets' original owners are Jerry and Darla Merrow of San Francisco. Their 48-foot catamaran, the Darla Jean, developed mast problems about 1,200 miles outside of Moss Landing during a four-day storm that brought 40 knot winds and high seas.

During the storm they lost their autopilot, their mainsail ripped and the engine swamped with water and wouldn't start. They had charted a course for Hawai'i, but with plenty of supplies, a wind generator, solar panels, water maker and lots of provisions, they weren't "in a hurry," Jerry Merrow told the magazine.

On the 94th day of the voyage, 110 miles from Christmas Island, the Darla Jean got caught in a current, the magazine said, and the Merrows altered their course to Fanning Island through the use of a handwritten chart that they entered into their GPS.

After several failed radio calls to Coast Guard and Fanning Island officials, the boat hit a reef and the couple, pets included, swam 200 yards to the island.

"They haven't contacted me about the pets," Joslin said. "All I've heard is that if something happens and the pets don't make it, they don't want to know. They want to move on believing that everything turned out all right."

For Snickers, it did.

Gulliver is still waiting.