Well, today seems to be the last day that we will be directly affected by now Tropical Storm Debby. It has been only three days, but seems like a week!
The original forecast for our area was for up to 10″ of rain, but not very much wind (like maximum of 30 knots for a short period of time.1) Hoping to minimize the water incursion into the boat from my two leaks, and since the winds wouldn’t be so strong as to rip them off the boat, I decided to cover up as much of the foredeck as possible with tarps. (I also went ahead and hung an awning over the main deck to help with the August heat.)
This prep took an entire day, including a trip to the hardware store for more bungee cords. While not perfect, it did end up preventing any water from coming in through my new leak, and only about a 1/2 cup got in through the old V-berth leak, so it was definitely worth the effort.
I also decided to double-up most of the dock lines on Serendipity just in case. I’d learned from my time with storms at DIYC that once the winds picked up, it was too late to do much “prep”, especially things like adding dock lines. Pulling out my extra lines from storage, rearranging them on the boat, then adding rubber shock absorbers and anti-chafe gear took another half-day.
Then the last step was making sure I was stocked up on groceries and freshwater in case the town lost power for an extended period of time, or flooding prevented access to food. (One of the nice things about being equipped as a cruiser is that I can be “off grid” for an extended period of time using my solar and engine to provide electricity–probably for a matter of weeks.)
After getting all my stuff squared away, I decided to make the rounds to see if anyone else needed any help. I quickly came across Matt, an English sailor, whose diesel inboard engine has been under a state of repair since I’ve been here. He was located on the outside of A Dock, a location that would be exposed to the worst of the weather. He had been given a slip on B Dock (inside the marina) to use, and was trying to figure out how to get his boat there. At this point, the winds had already picked up to about 15 knots, so getting off the dock and around to inside the marina would be challenging, even with an operable engine.
His plan was to try to fasten his 6 hp dinghy engine to the swim ladder of his boat and use that to propel it into the waiting slip. He and Greg, a neighboring boater, worked feverishly on that as the bands started coming through, each time drenching them (and eventually me, too).
In fact, the first band, which surprisingly had the strongest winds of all, launched my bicycle across the dock, bending the derailleur and breaking the tail light. I kept it tied to the dock after that.
They eventually got it sort of mounted to the swim ladder, but it was very sketchy at best.
What I so wish I would have captured with my phone was when he was trying to get it from forward gear back to neutral. His motor had a tendency to stall unless he kept some RPM on it, so when he accidentally went past the neutral detent and into reverse, the entire engine and swim ladder immediately swung out of the water, almost knocking him off the dinghy before he could get it under control. It’s a miracle that neither he nor his dinghy were damaged by the prop! (I had to walk away, not wanting to witness such craziness.)
Eventually, we decided to initially walk it down the length of A Dock to the point where he’d have to turn around and motor back into the inside of the marina to his new slip. But, by this time, the intervals between rain and wind bands was getting smaller and smaller and the rain bands longer and longer in duration. Dark was also approaching, and Matt was beginning to get quite stressed out, because his boat was now in an even more vulnerable position that where it had been!
He was also unsure whether the little 6 hp engine would work to get him to where he wanted to go.
Luckly, about then, someone placed a call to Jim Edwards, the owner of “Bow and Stern”, a well-known boat rental/sailing instruction company in the area who had a dinghy that was equipped to tow boats (and who had originally towed Matt in when his engine had died.) Jim graciously agreed to come out in his dinghy when he could find a weather window and tow Matt to the new slip. We had to wait for about an hour for there to be another break, but then he showed up and masterfully towed Matt (with Greg aboard) to his new slip with others of us tending lines there as they approached. Matt was very relieved to finally be tied up and secure as the main part of the storm approached.
In this situation, and a dozen others over the next few days, it was great to see the boaters coming to each other’s aid as required by the storm.
In the event, as forecast, the storm stalled off shore of northern Georgia/southern South Carolina, causing us to get hit incessantly by the bands every 20 or 30 minutes over the next three days. We received consistently strong winds (25-30 knots) and rain every time a band of weather would go through, followed by 20, 30, or sometimes even 60 minutes of calm in between. On the first band we did get hit by a very strong wind (I estimate 45-50 knots) and painful rain for about 20 minutes, but after that it didn’t seem to get much higher than some 35-knot gusts.
But what was rough about it wasn’t that the winds were all that strong, but that they never let up! After the first day, the wind stopped subsiding in between the rain bands; the rain would stop but the winds would just ease a bit. This consistent wind with the southernly fetch began stirring up the water, causing the boats located on the south side of A Dock like Serendipity to rock and roll, non-stop, in a very confused way (interspersed with occasional “yanks” against the dock lines).
These videos only show it about half as bad as it was when a band would come through with its higher winds (but when I couldn’t video because of the rain).
Inside the boat, it felt like being in a moderate, confused seaway. I actually had to unlock the gimble function on my stove so that I could cook! Like others, I had to adjust my dock lines a number of times, not only because of the storm surge2, but because the lines were stretching so much by being under constant strain. Unfortunately, because of all the tarps on the foredeck, this was not a simple process!
It was all manageable, but by the second day, it was just getting very irritating, and I found myself needing to get off the boat and onto terra firma more and more. I noticed that most of the other owners of boats on the south side of A Dock were doing the same thing.
But today, the winds have finally settled down quite a bit, and tomorrow they should be back to normal. It appears that only one boat sustained any damage (a crack in its topsides after it hit the dock), so that is fortunate.
So, I guess I no longer have any excuse to not get back to boat projects!
- I should have foreseen that the forecasters would once again underestimate the strength of the wind we would receive. ↩︎
- As was previously noted, normally a south wind lowers the water level in the marina, but because of the storm surge, we actually had high water with a south wind, which caught a lot of us by surprise. ↩︎