Waiting for it…

We’re sitting where the arrow is…the X was where we first arrived in this river.

Most of the work of a hurricane is getting ready for it.  All the prep takes time, whether it’s for your house of your boat.  Having owned a waterfront house and a boat, I can tell you getting the boat ready is a lot more work.

The storm concerns for riding a storm out at anchor on a boat are quite different than for those on land, and even different for those that are tied to a dock.  The biggest difference is the whole “Storm Surge” and the rain.  If you are tied to some pilings and the water raises up fix or six feet higher than it normally does you can break loose or suffer damage.  Your street and house can get flooded.  On a boat at anchor, well it gets a little deeper so we just need to have a little more chain our.

On land you also view the wind differently – it knocks things over and throws them around.  So trees fall down and knock out power lines and crush cars and houses, loose objects become missiles.  You might spend a week or more without power after a big storm.  On your own boat we can’t lose power easily since we’re self contained.

So your concerns and cares are very different – the out of breath hysteria on TV over sand bags and flooding doesn’t apply so much.

Our largest concern is the wind.  The wind can affect us a couple of ways.  First, it can blow so hard on the boat that it can uproot our anchor.  Worse, it can uproot the guy up wind from us that didn’t prepare as well.  Also the wind can cause damage to gear that isn’t secured.  Dragging our anchor is the biggest fear – you don’t want to drag because you don’t want to end up having your boat tossed up on land or into another boat.  Dragging your anchor near other boats can tangle your anchor up with theirs, which makes more boats drag.  Horror stories about one boat dragging through a field of boats and hauling them all to shore abound.

So what do we have to do?  Basically we need to reduce the ‘Windage’ of the boat, reduce the impact of the wind, and try to get stuck to the bottom as hard as we possibly can.

Reducing the Windage.  This means you take down all the sails, and everything that can blow and catch the wind.  Off come the bimini covers, grills, flags, and metal frames.  Dinghies and boats need to be lashed down to the deck – a dinghy hanging in the davits will catch a lot of air.  When we arrive at Fishing Bay last Friday night we immediately dropped our large head sail.  That thing weighs about 130 lbs and would be really hard to tame if the wind picked up as it did Saturday morning.  So off it came.

Reducing the impact of the wind.  The insane numbers you hear for wind speeds during a storm are generally taken out in the open water.  In addition, wind that blows for any period of time across open water (what we refer to as “fetch”) builds of waves and chop – lots of wind +  lots of fetch = lots of big waves.  Those scary pictures you see of boats bobbing and thrashing around are usually in more open areas with lots of fetch.  How to avoid this?  Well – you hide behind something, and you park the boat someplace without a lot of fetch.  If you look where we are anchored in the chart above, you will see that with mostly Northerly (N, NW, and NE) winds expected from Hurricane Sandy, there’s actually a lot of land the wind gets blocked by before it hits us, and there’s very little fetch between the shore and us for waves to build up.

Will and I assembling the Luke Anchor

Stick Hard to the Bottom.  Anchors…metal…lots of it.  There are several schools of thought on how best to rig your anchors for a nasty blow.  Some people set multiple anchors in various patterns from vees in front of the boat to stars depending on how the wind is expected to veer around.  What everyone agrees is that you need a lot of weight, and you need to protect all your anchor gear from chafing because it is chafing that makes boats break loose.  Unprotected lines on a boat bobbing around in a blow will be cut through unbelievably quickly.  We carry three anchors on Evenstar, our regular 100 lb. Manson Supreme, an older 105lb. CQR as a backup, and the Luke “Storm Anchor”, a 150lb. monstrosity I have taken no end of ribbing about since a red faced and puffing UPS guy left it in our driveway.  We also have 300′ of very strong and heavy 7/16″ high proof chain for our primary anchor rode.

Our pre-storm to do list looked something like this:

• Remove head sail and stow below
• Remove Bimini canvas and frame
• Pull out the Luke Storm Anchor and assemble it (breaks into three parts for easy stowage!)
• Rig two anchors (the Luke on the end, with the Manson 15′ or so up from it) on the rode
• Set the two anchors (not as easy as it sounds!)
• Rig extra chafe gear on anchor snubbers
• Remove grill, throwable flotation, cushions, and other blowable items and stow
• Secure Portland Pudgy to foredeck
• Remove and secure engine from primary dinghy
• Hoist primary dinghy on board, deflate, and lash on to deck
• Tape windows just to make sure there’s no leaking
• Finish repairs to secure some loose solar panels
• Close off or reverse the various vents on the deck.
• Secure halyards so they don’t slap and chafe
• Secure the wind generator so it won’t spin (even though it’s rated for 99 mph wind, better safe than sorry)

And so on – all four of us put in a hard day getting all this sorted out.  Many of those tasks were multi-part tasks.  For example when one attaches an anchor you don’t just screw on the connections, you need to do what is called “seizing” them.  This is wrapping wire through the holes in the shackle to prevent the shackles from turning.  Or course if you are swapping anchors around you need to take the old seizing off before you can put the new shackles on the other anchors.  And getting that anchor overboard!  As you can see from the pictures it is a large, awkward thing with lots of rough metal parts that just are dying to chew up fiberglass and teak.  Our solution was to rig up a small rope that we connected to our spinnaker halyard.  This we ran to one of the powered winches to use as a crane.  Kathy went in the dinghy to cut the anchor free once we’d lowered it down into the water.  The second anchor just came right off the roller after it.  We wrapped one of the snubbers (a shock absorbing line) with a piece of fire hose to protect it from chafe, the other one we wrapped in a reinforced 1″ piece of hose.

Awkward anchor lies in wait to gouge gelcoat and wood.

But now, all the prep is pretty much over but the waiting.  The storm is now currently expected to pick up force here in another 12-24 hours and last for another day or two past that.  So we’re doing some school, reading, watching movies, cooking and passing the time waiting for the wind to pick up.

The good news is that as protected as this area looks (we’re almost three miles inland from the main part of the Chesapeake) there are only two other boats that decided to shelter here from the storm.  So we’re at very little risk of getting dragged into by someone, though there is a large and spooky looking barge thing tied to a mooring downwind of us.  I’m hoping that that all the metal we’re dropped on the bottom will keep us off of that!

So now we listen to the rain, and wait for the wind to come.