So our second season of dealing with hurricanes turned out to be the fifth most active since record keeping started in the mid 1800s. Growing up in the Southwest, hurricanes were a sort of curiosity that happened to other people. Now that we owned a boat that could be in harm's way, much less ourselves, it had a much more visceral feel for us.
For much of the season we were away from the boat, mostly in Arizona, but for more than a week hauling the trailer of Chelsea's belongings from Arizona to Florida. We tried to check the weather every morning and evening just like we were on the boat, but we missed those checks all too often. Every time we checked it seemed like there was another storm forming, or a worrying development for one of the already named storms.
We had done everything we could on the boat short of removing the sails. The conventional main sail was pretty secure inside a stack-pack type bag on the boom. There was little chance that the mainsail was going anywhere. The fore sail was a different matter. It's a roller furling sail. If it starts to unroll the newly exposed bit of sail can catch more wind and unroll it some more. This quickly becomes a runaway reaction. And if the wind was strong enough to pull the sail open there is little to be done but watch it tear itself apart or cut it down.
I didn't yet feel comfortable taking the jib down, so I secured the furling lines. For a little more safety I also tied down the drum that has to rotate to unfurl the sail. With everything else stripped from the topsides we and the boat were as ready as we were going to get.
Harvey hit Texas in late August, very near the boat's previous owner's home, and not far from where we had bought the boat and kept it during last year's hurricane season. Irma hit Cudjoe Key on September 10th, which is just south of the bridge from Marathon, where we had spent much of the summer. The area was devastated and we're very glad we had scooted out of there in July. After briefly heading toward the west coat of Florida, Irma started its strange march more or less up the center of the state. We had our oldest daughter in Tallahassee, our boat in Brunswick, and our car at the Jacksonville airport. Irma shimmied between our three areas of concern, with no more than about 50 mph winds at any of the three locations. The worst damage was to a side mirror on the car, which to be fair, was only held in place with a couple of zip ties and the end of a paint stirrer stick. We got back to the car late at night and the mirror was quickly repaired yet again, this time with a blue bungee cord. To my shame it's still there 6k miles later.
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