Issue 4 : Jan/Feb 1999
In 1978 I was overcome with the desire to have a new good old boat built. A boat that would sail gently around the world and would take, within reason, whatever the furies would throw at her.
This conceit required a boat with a cute, roundy backside, a long seakindly keel that would death-grip the seas and, a thing that was not being done at the time, a pilothouse wherein I could recline in warm and luxurious decadence as the winds blew up to around impossible. The only designer who filled this unlikely bill was Ted Brewer. Thus was Unlikely born and during the next 20 years, in 35,000 miles of circumnavigation, Ted’s boat (not mine, really his) cozened and comforted us and kept us safe … of course we never ran into much more than 50 knots … until …
The truth is that it is almost impossible to make secure preparations for your boat for any hurricane above force one.
Any boat at anchor or at dock which does survive a major storm needs one large dollop of good luck. Some survive and others do not, and the difference rarely depends on how effectively the boat is prepared.
Is staying with your boat an option? It is my experience from actual storms, that if a wind rises to 50 knots (that is still 50 percent below hurricane force), you will not be able to take any actions to improve your boat’s survival while at anchor or tied to a dock. The winds of hurricanes scream beyond description. Not only do they nail you to the deck, but they can also suck the very breath out of your lungs.
A real danger of staying aboard is from flying objects torn from your boat, from other boats nearby or, indeed, from the shore. During a strong blow, the air is filled with objects traveling at speeds easily capable of impaling you to your mast.
Do not stay aboard. Do not underestimate the storm’s strength and do not overestimate your own. In anything over even minimal hurricane force, you are less than the proverbial straw in the wind.
Hurricane predictions have risen to a fine art but not yet to a proven and infallible science. Predictors can answer the questions of where and of when‚ and they have good information concerning the predominate winds of a hurricane but — and this is a large but — the evidence is accumulating that vagrant winds of tornado force which lie embedded within the hurricane and far exceed the speed of a hurricane’s winds of circulation do much of the damage.
Let me tell you the tale of how we almost lost Unlikely in Hurricane Georges. We live near Key West, Fla. Unlikely is docked behind a strong concrete seawall in a 40-foot-wide canal. This is a little awkward since Unlikely is 46 feet in length. The extra six feet, along with higher-than-predicted winds, are what almost sank her.
I was in Spain doing a piece on the fascinating Basque country and the terrible Bay of Biscay when I first heard that Georges might well strike my home and boat. I managed a quick flight home and arrived at the Key West Airport on the last flight in before they closed the airport. I was rushing to get in, while everybody else was fighting to get out. A local TV crew found this highly amusing, but since my deadly serious business was to protect my boat, my companion of 20 years, I was not amused.
By now we knew that the storm would surely pass over the Keys at some point. Most of us hoped it would miss us entirely, since Key West had not experienced a hurricane since 1965. Many storms had approached but, as hurricanes generally do, they veered northward at the last moment. We felt protected by Cuba which, being a large land mass, either takes the sting out of a blow or bends it north toward the Carolinas.
This time, however, the hurricane acted as no other had done in all the years that hurricanes had been tracked. Hurricanes always lose strength over land. Georges hardly did. When he approached Cuba, he slyly sidled just off the northern coast and built strength over the open sea. More unbelievably, Hurricane Georges started out thousands of miles to the east and made an unwavering, straight, beeline course toward Key West. No other hurricane had ever failed to wander. Georges, seemingly with a mind of his own, broke the mold. It was as if Georges was sentient and was intent on hitting Key West.
I arrived at my home on Geiger Key just a few hours before Georges blew in. I was able to prepare, as well as I could on information received, my beloved Unlikely. We had been told to expect very high storm surges, as much as 8 or 9 feet, and winds that probably would not exceed 85 mph. On the basis of this, I rigged Unlikely more for surge than for wind in the middle of the 40-foot-wide canal. I used four 3⁄4-inch nylon anchor rodes, each 100 feet long, as springlines. I reckoned that these would handle any reasonable surge, and we had some indication that, in passing over Cuba, the winds might well drop a bit.
In the actual unfolding of the storm, my rigging proved inadequate because the conditions we eventually faced were far from what had been predicted. While the tiedown would have been correct for predictions of an 8-foot surge, the actual surge was barely 3 feet over normal high tide. But what almost sank Unlikely was the winds which rose on Geiger Key to a screaming 120 mph while I was prepared for only 85.
The long nylon spring lines were unable to hold against these howling winds and stretched until Unlikely was thrust on her beam ends against the opposite sea wall. Had the winds been as predicted, or had the surge been higher, the lines would have held. But as she was pushed up against concrete walls, the lines chafed on the concrete and broke, releasing Unlikely to barrel down the canal as the fury of the storm rose and as darkness fell.
The last I saw of her — just before dark — she had fetched up across the canal, and since she was longer than the canal was wide, her bow rose up and rested on one sea wall, and her stern was thrust down below the other. Her stern was so low in the water I was convinced that she was holed and filling, and I prepared mentally to mourn her loss. The mourning lasted the entire night and since my whole sense of self, my relevance, has been linked to Unlikely for 20 years, the emotional blow of contemplating her loss was unbearable.
What made matters worse was the length of time that I was entangled emotionally in the belief that Unlikely was gone and the amount of hurricane time to which she was subjected. Hurricane-force winds rarely last for more than an hour over any point of land. Furthermore, hurricane winds are deprived of their full force by interaction with a landmass. In Hurricane Georges, Geiger Key endured an unheard-of 12 hours of hurricane-force winds. The paucity of the landmass in the Keys allowed the winds to scream on at full force for what seemed an eternity as the storm wall, the right-hand terrible quadrant surrounding an unusually large eye, slowly and inexorably moved across Geiger Key.
It was bad enough that the predictions about windspeed and surge were wrong, but Unlikely was also asked to survive 12 unheard-of hours of horrendous winds and leaping wind-driven seas pounding her up against an unyielding concrete wall.
It is not surprising that in that terrible night, that endless 12 hours, I gave up on Unlikely as I watched the seas break up and scatter the six-inch-thick concrete slab that lay under our home. Unlikely was insured but not for enough. No boat ever is. What she was not insured for was the 20 years of love and respect that she gained in our eyes in the course of a circumnavigation through all of the terrible and not-so-terrible seas of the world. To have survived 35,000 miles of foreign and sometimes uncharted seas, and then to come a cropper in my own back yard, was the final irony. Just before dawn broke, I wept for her.
But as the winds wound down and the light grew in a wildly cloud-scattered sky, the incredible sight was of Unlikely still afloat in the canal. She was bobbing about in the remaining winds, unfettered and unattached, rubbing her tough flanks against unforgiving concrete. But she floated! We still had our boat. Thank you, once again, Ted Brewer!
I climbed aboard and went below, anticipating rising water, but I could find no evidence of holing. She had taken hurricane-driven salt water through every above-the-waterline crevice, and there are many in all sailboats. All the electronics above decks and below were ruined. Everything on deck (I had left her rigged for a passage to Cuba) which I had no time to stow before Georges struck — sails, life raft, dinghy, bikes, and lines — were scattered, lost, and sunk over hundreds of miles of sea. Additionally her starboard chainplates were ripped out. But, amazingly the mast held (I believe partly due to a blue goo called Spartite which welded the mast to the deck.)
We still had our boat.
It is beginning to be understood that while macro winds of a hurricane can be accurately predicted, the micro tornadoes that a hurricane spawns in the wall of the eye are entirely chaotic and can no more be predicted than can an individual wave in a wind-tossed sea. It was a small tornado which delivered 120-mph winds over Geiger Key while, less than six miles away, the City of Key West suffered only hurricane force one, and then only for an hour or two as the eye, not the fierce right forward quadrant, passed over the city.
In the light of the tornado activity, which is now being demonstrated by satellite photos of hurricane-ravaged places, there is no positive, sure manner of securing a boat.
The best way to deal with a hurricane is not to be there. Sail away to a safer (not guaranteed) area, tuck her into the mangroves or simply pray that the vicious mini twisters that hurricanes spawn might as likely miss as hit you.
With the help of the understanding Bankers Insurance Company and a bunch of dollars of our own, Unlikely, the ultimate good old boat, will sail again as good as or, perhaps, better than new.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
