A 5-week-old kitten may have used up one of his nine lives after being rescued from beneath the docks at the Redondo Beach Marina last month.

A family visiting the marina late last month noticed tiny meows coming from beneath the wooden decking at the kayak launch while they were gearing up to go for a paddle in the harbor.

“Just before my wife got in the kayak, she heard a noise,” said Leon Tachauer, a New Yorker traveling with his wife and three daughters. “She was like, ‘Do you hear that? It sounds like a kitten.’”

The family notified nearby dockworker Val Kielbasinski, who tried to locate the cat. Without seeing where it was, Kielbasinski put on a pair of goggles — and jumped into the murky water.“I thought, ‘If I don’t go in quickly, the cat might drown,’” said the 22-year-old El Camino College electrical engineering student, who works part time at the Glass Bottom Boat company in the marina. “Because sometimes, while we were listening, the meowing would stop.”

It was too dark under the dock to see anything. So Kielbasinski crawled out, grabbed a toolkit and unscrewed several of the wooden planks to get to the underbelly of the dock.

What he saw there, clinging to a floating barrel beneath the boards, was a small gray tabby not much bigger than Kielbasinski’s hands. It was damp — but also healthy and strong.

“After we saved it, the cat was just purring, like rubbing up against us,” he said. “He was happy. He was thankful.”

Kielbasinski picked up the kitten and wrapped him in a towel while colleagues scrambled to figure out what to do with a squirmy, tiny kitten in a crowded marina during a workday.

A coworker went to a nearby market and purchased a can of albacore tuna, which the kitten devoured.

“He was definitely hungry,” Kielbasinski said.

Nobody knows how long the kitten had been stranded beneath the dock. But, Kielbasinski said, he didn’t hear any noises from the water the night before. The fortunate feline likely got stuck sometime between the evening of June 26 and the morning of June 27.

Amber Landino, Redondo Beach Marina’s assistant property manager, took the kitten to a local veterinarian, where the 1-pound, 12-ounce male kitten was given a clean bill of health.

Landino named him “Dock,” and she said she’s going to keep him.

“He’s super-cuddly,” she said. “I can’t turn away animals.”

Tachauer, who took photos of the ordeal, reached out to The Beach Reporter via the news tips link, calling it a good “local hero story.”

“With all the stuff that’s going on in the world, it’s always good to have feel-good stories, right?” he said. “Nice stories bring people together, no matter what they believe in. And everyone loves a little kitten.”

So now the big question is: How does a 5-week-old kitten end up beneath the boards of a floating dock — where the only way in is by swimming underwater?

“Everybody has the same question: How did it end up there?” Landino said. “He had to have gone underwater. I don’t know, maybe he was trying to get up onto the dock and was drowning and flailing and just grabbed onto what he could.

“He’s just such a lucky guy.”

Nobody has reported a lost cat in the marina — a small community where “everybody knows each other,” Landino said.

Landino said she worries that the kitten may have been intentionally tossed into the water.

“We do have feral cats at the marina, but they’ve all been fixed and released back,” Landino said. “There are people who come to take care of those cats, so they’d have noticed if one of the cats was pregnant or if there were kittens.

“You’d like to think maybe he got away and was just curious and fell into the water,” she added, “but he’s a mystery, for sure.”

Another thing: Landino said she’s noticed that the kitten makes subtle “swimming” motions when he sleeps, curling his front legs in little arcs while he kneads his paws.

“It’s more than just typical kitten kneading,” she said. “Maybe that’s why he made it — his kneading turned into arm strokes. He’s a little miracle.”