Hurricane, Just Don’t!

HURRICANE
Body discovered in a sunken boat belongs to man missing since Ian, Lee County sheriff says
The boater was the last resident missing in Lee since Ian’s landfall on Sept. 27 — bringing the county’s death toll to 75.- Miami Herald

They didn’t find him until January 13th. Your boat isn’t worth dying for. I lost a customer in Andrew. It was several years before they found his skeletal remains in the mangroves.

https://www.fox13news.com/news/body...-ian-found-on-sunken-boat-in-fort-myers-beach

https://www.aol.com/news/body-discovered-sunken-boat-belongs-015502717.html

HopCar said:

HURRICANE
Body discovered in a sunken boat belongs to man missing since Ian, Lee County sheriff says
The boater was the last resident missing in Lee since Ian’s landfall on Sept. 27 — bringing the county’s death toll to 75.- Miami Herald

They didn’t find him until January 13th. Your boat isn’t worth dying for. I lost a customer in Andrew. It was several years before they found his skeletal remains in the mangroves.

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A skeleton was found hanging in a tree in Gulfport, MS several years after Katrina.

I rode out Hurricane Elena in 1985. Halfway through, I made a deal with God that if he would save me from that hurricane, he would never have to do it again!

I was 180 miles from the coast when Katrina hit us.

We don't have hurricanes up here but we still get some awesome Great lakes storms in October and November.

When one is coming I double and triple my lines, double and triple my fenders and leave it in God's hands.

I was on my boat once, at a dock during just such a storm. It rocked almost 45 degrees port to starboard. We had no place to go so we stayed on board. There was nothing we could do. Just sit there and rock it out.

pete

Pete Meisinger said:

We don't have hurricanes up here but we still get some awesome Great lakes storms in October and November.

When one is coming I double and triple my lines, double and triple my fenders and leave it in God's hands.

I was on my boat once, at a dock during just such a storm. It rocked almost 45 degrees port to starboard. We had no place to go so we stayed on board. There was nothing we could do. Just sit there and rock it out.

pete

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Yep, I know a few people who have rode one out on a boat once. I don’t thinkI know a single one who says they would do it again.

We rode a cyclone out in Vanuatu one year
Thankfully it was not an overly bad one and we had got ourselves in a good spot
Only got 12 hours notice on satphone which kept dropping out
Several hours of hard steaming into a harbour of sorts where we ran out all the anchoring gear and tied bum into beach to coconut palms.

No way could we have made it back to civilization in time and teleportation is not a thing.

When we bought our last boat in Virginia there was a hurricane coming up the coast. The marina spent about a week prepping boats for it. We had about 800’ of line tying up up in the slip. We, Radar and me, were going to stay aboard if it was going to be a Cat 1 or 2 and leave if anything above that. Fortunately it turned out to sea and we just got a lot of wind and rain. So we didn’t have to make the decision to stay or leave.

The two most exciting stories I personally know:

A close friend who road Katrina out on his 37 ‘ ketch, anchored in St. Louis Bay. He immediately started dragging all the way across the bay and could tell he was headed for the woods when his anchor caught a steel cable on the bottom (discovered later). He said he then sat and watched cars, houses, and everything else float by him, waiting for one to hit and sink him. None did.

The other funny part of the story was he finally dinghied ashore, to the Highway, after miraculously getting through to his girlfriend on his cell phone, to come pick him up in her helicopter.

While he was waiting, police approached him and asked if he was okay and what he was doing, and he told them he was waiting for his girlfriend to come get him in her helicopter. He said they were treating him like he was crazy and mentally ill, right up until the point she came in and landed on the highway!

The second was a medical doctor I knew who rode Hurricane Elena out in 1985 in his Cape Dory 30, anchored in Krebbs Lake (it’s really a big bay). He drug, too, finally coming to rest up against a metal barge that the Cape Dory was bashed into until it started to sink. As it sunk, he climbed up onto the barge and spent the rest of the hurricane trying to take shelter behind one of the barges mooring bits, then managed to swim ashore and walk home later that day after the surge went down.

Neither account makes me ever want to do it.

Group9 said:

Yep, I know a few people who have rode one out on a boat once. I don’t thinkI know a single one who says they would do it again.

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I have an acquaintance who is not that smart.
He rode out super storm Sandy in his old 34 Mainship while on a mooring in Noank (Mystic), CT.
He got terribly seasick after about 30minutes once the big winds and waves came. He spent hours on the floor of the salon puking his guts out, while getting battered with just about everything not bolted down in the salon including the sofa, and items from the down galley.
His boat survived fine, and he said he was lucky to be alive......
AND that he would do it again to keep his boat safe.
WTF!

I guess it's true that you can't fix stupid.

jleonard said:

I have an acquaintance who is not that smart.
He rode out super storm Sandy in his old 34 Mainship while on a mooring in Noank (Mystic), CT.
He got terribly seasick after about 30minutes once the big winds and waves came.

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Hahaha. I might try it in some boats, but not that one.

The eye of superstorm Sandy went over top of me.

In the right hurticane hole, rigged properly and it is way less dramatic than what some people go tbrough.

What many call protected or hurricane holes, I cant agree with.

I have done salvage ops in 50+ knot, gusring to 60 winds in a 26 Shamrock in NJ. Not fun but in properly protected waters with no chance of flooding not a big deal again...... just what a lot of areas see occasionally in the winter out of hurricane territory.

For the new, probably not advised but with proper experience, and it being your only home, a gamble with merit.

psneeld said:

The eye of superstorm Sandy went over top of me.

In the right hurticane hole, rigged properly and it is way less dramatic than what some people go tbrough.

What many call protected or hurricane holes, I cant agree with.

I have done salvage ops in 50+ knot, gusring to 60 winds in a 26 Shamrock in NJ. Not fun but in properly protected waters with no chance of flooding not a big deal again...... just what a lot of areas see occasionally in the winter out of hurricane territory.

For the new, probably not advised but with proper experience, and it being your only home, a gamble with merit.

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I've prepared my boats for hurricanes at least a half dozen times where the Hurricane hit them directly. I didn't lose a single one, but I was never tempted to ride it out in them. My feeling is, if I've prepared the boat the best I can, there is probably little I can do if something goes wrong in the middle of the storm.

psneeld said:

The eye of superstorm Sandy went over top of me.

In the right hurticane hole, rigged properly and it is way less dramatic than what some people go tbrough.

What many call protected or hurricane holes, I cant agree with.

I have done salvage ops in 50+ knot, gusring to 60 winds in a 26 Shamrock in NJ. Not fun but in properly protected waters with no chance of flooding not a big deal again...... just what a lot of areas see occasionally in the winter out of hurricane territory.

For the new, probably not advised but with proper experience, and it being your only home, a gamble with merit.

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Location definitely makes a big difference. Riding out 80+ kt winds is one thing, but doing it with any kind of sea state or in an area where you have to worry about things hitting you is a whole different game.

rslifkin said:

Location definitely makes a big difference. Riding out 80+ kt winds is one thing, but doing it with any kind of sea state or in an area where you have to worry about things hitting you is a whole different game.

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I know, but many consider places hurricane holes that I would NEVER use unless it was the only choice and then I would NOT be on the boat during the storm. Most really aren't good hurricane holes, just better locations than where the boat is usually kept.

Good ones are far and few between, not necessarily close by and I was lucky enough to find some good ones while flying with the USCG.....

I'm sure some captains think, "I'll ride it out, if worse comes to worse I'll fire up the engine, point it into the wind and ride it out some more"

Not a good plan.

pete

Off topic but interesting! Sorry for the diversion!

NYC almost lost its 59 storyCitibank tower to an approaching hurricane due to a design flaw discovered by a Princeton student who contacted the engineer which would have obviously had terrible consequences.

“LeMessurier compared the velocity of winds the building could withstand with weather data and found that a storm strong enough to topple Citicorp Center hits New York City every 55 years on average,” the authors write, noting that he also found that a citywide blackout would “leave the tower vulnerable even in a less extreme storm scenario. For each year the Citicorp Center stood, LeMessurier figured, it stood about a one in 16 chance of collapsing. It was a catastrophic disaster waiting to happen right in the heart of Manhattan.”

As it happened, Hurricane Ella, the strongest hurricane on record, was forming in the Atlantic Ocean at the time.

The response was swift, like a mobilization out of a disaster film. LeMessurier and his team worked with Citicorp and the NYPD to quietly develop an emergency evacuation plan for 10 blocks around. Three different weather services monitored Ella, and 2,500 Red Cross volunteers were kept on standby.

Still, LeMessurier and Citicorp lucked out. The city’s newspapers were on strike at the time, so they never reported the fiasco. Construction crews worked at night, in secret, to fix the issue and were gone by the time employees came to work in the morning. The story didn’t go public until 1995, when journalist Joe Morgenstern reported it in the New Yorker”

https://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye...that_could_have_wiped_out_the_skyscraper.html

https://www.lemessurier.com/sites/d...awPrincetonGrad ModernSteelConstr Oct2012.pdf

Hurricane winds can be amazing. Hurricane Katrina blew the air condition condensers off the top of our six story building. They landed in the parking lot and they were heavy. I would have never dreamed that just the wind would have been able to do that.

jleonard said:

I have an acquaintance who is not that smart.
He rode out super storm Sandy in his old 34 Mainship while on a mooring in Noank (Mystic), CT.
He got terribly seasick after about 30minutes once the big winds and waves came. He spent hours on the floor of the salon puking his guts out, while getting battered with just about everything not bolted down in the salon including the sofa, and items from the down galley.
His boat survived fine, and he said he was lucky to be alive......
AND that he would do it again to keep his boat safe.
WTF!
I guess it's true that you can't fix stupid.

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I'm not sure how his staying on the boat, getting terribly seasick, laying incapacitated on the floor of the salon, and risking his life, made the boat more likely to survive the storm. . . . What am I missing?

slowgoesit said:

I'm not sure how his staying on the boat, getting terribly seasick, laying incapacitated on the floor of the salon, and risking his life, made the boat more likely to survive the storm. . . .

What am I missing?

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Wrong question.
The correct question - What is he missing?

slowgoesit said:

I'm not sure how his staying on the boat, getting terribly seasick, laying incapacitated on the floor of the salon, and risking his life, made the boat more likely to survive the storm. . . . What am I missing?

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Depends where you are I guess
Getting off is not always an option.

When in Vanuatu with a small cyclone coming at us
I considered the crew and I may be better off going ashore and taking shelter in a nearby structure.
The Ne Van crew advised against it saying coconuts and palm fronds would kill us.

Sure enough, when it passed the ground was littered with coconuts and palm fronds and the small structure was flattened.

In Oz a few months ago we had a small cyclone coming close to us while out at the reef - we made the 60nm run back in to Gladstone and hid up a mangrove creek.
But big tides and strong winds would have made it a treacherous run back to "safe" land in our bigger than most, tender
Far safer to stay on the big boat.

psneeld said:

The eye of superstorm Sandy went over top of me.

In the right hurticane hole, rigged properly and it is way less dramatic than what some people go tbrough.

What many call protected or hurricane holes, I cant agree with.

I have done salvage ops in 50+ knot, gusring to 60 winds in a 26 Shamrock in NJ. Not fun but in properly protected waters with no chance of flooding not a big deal again...... just what a lot of areas see occasionally in the winter out of hurricane territory.

For the new, probably not advised but with proper experience, and it being your only home, a gamble with merit.

Click to expand...

I agree.

I know people who were in Cyclone Yasi jammed up a creek a few miles away at Hinchinbrook island and said it was a pretty easy thing.
Literally hundreds of places to stuff a boat around there.

Not so for those who thought the nearby marina was the safe place to be.

It's heartbreaking to hear about the loss of life due to hurricanes and other natural disasters. The discovery of the missing boater's body is a tragic reminder of the dangers posed by these extreme weather events, and it's essential to take precautions to ensure safety and well-being during these times.

Boat owners should always heed the warnings and advice of local authorities and evacuate when necessary to avoid the risk of injury or death. It's also crucial to secure boats and other property before a hurricane strikes to minimize damage and prevent them from becoming hazards during and after the storm.

As you mentioned, the loss of a customer due to a hurricane is a devastating experience, and it's something that can have a profound impact on the affected individuals and their families. It's essential to remember that material possessions can always be replaced, but human life cannot. Taking appropriate safety measures can help prevent tragic accidents and ensure that everyone stays safe during and after a hurricane.

I had completely forgotten about one of the saddest stories I had after Katrina that involved someone staying on a boat (we were kind of overloaded with sad stories.)

Our relief base was set up just north of where the Gulfport Harbor had been (Katrina just completely scoured it off the face of the earth). It was just flat.

Three days later, a Vietnamese lady in her fifties walks up to our base and says she is trying to find the harbor (and, it's hard understand how common that was, with everything gone, it was easy to not to know where you were going, or where you were.)

So, we told her, "The harbor's just over there, but there's nothing left. What are you trying to go there for?" What she said broke my heart after that.

She, said, "My husband rode it out on our shrimp boat in Gulfport Harbor." Now, normally, all the shrimp boats, very few of which have hull coverage because they are all old, and many are still made of wood, and/or they can't afford it, haul butt up into the upper river reaches for hurricanes. So, I asked her, "Are you sure he didn't just go up one of the rivers?" And, she explained their motor had been broken and he was trying to fix it to go up the river, but called her and he told her he couldn't fix it so he just going to ride it out at the marina.

Now, at this point, I had been all over that area, and there was no shrimp boat washed up anywhere. If it was there, it was sunk, or smashed into unrecognizable debris. And, this had been three days, and I'm thinking, if her husband was still alive, he could have walked home. But, the cell towers were all gone, so you could be somewhere and have trouble letting people know. But, after three days, I'm thinking, this guy's probably dead. But, I couldn't say that to her.

We just kept saying, "There are no shrimp boats over there anywhere." And, she was crying, and we kept asking her if we could give her a ride somewhere and she shook us off and started walking toward the harbor. What could you do? That story of missing people was repeated all over the place, even some of our people. I never figured out if he was one of the Vietnamese people who died, or if he had made it somewhere and just hadn't been able to communicate, yet.