David’s Voyage Blog

Publish Date: Sunday, September 5, 2010
Location: East Greenwich, Rhode Island
Coordinates: 41° 40.997′ N  71° 25.980′ W

Actually, by the time Earl reached us he was downgraded to a tropical storm. Although we were very happy about this, it was a bit anti-climatic after two days of preparations. Don’t get me wrong: We are thrilled with how it turned out — nobody wants to be in the middle of 80-knot winds — but there was still this strange feeling of being all dressed up with nowhere to go. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Early in the week it looked like Hurricane Earl could come right up Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island (where we’re moored), or more likely, pass very close to the east. We were definitely “in the cone” as the forecasters say. Even as late as Thursday morning the prediction cone still encompassed all of Narragansett Bay (see below), and they were predicting that Earl would still be a hurricane when he got here Friday evening. We had no choice but to prepare for the worst, while hoping for the best.

Assuming you’re not out in the open ocean, there are two main dangers to a boat during a hurricane: high winds (including the stuff blowing around in the wind) and large storm surge. The high winds can blow stuff off the boat, and it can also hurl hard things into the boat. A large storm surge can drastically change the nature of how your boat and the boats around you are tied up in a marina. Fortunately, all the models were predicting that Narragansett Bay would get the north and west side of the hurricane, which meant that storm surge would probably not be an issue: a hurricane’s winds blow in a counter-clockwise direction, so we would be getting east winds, followed by north winds, and eventually west winds after the hurricane passed. None of these winds were going to push a significant storm surge up into Narragansett Bay, so our primary concern was the wind.

Kathryn and I decided it would be safer for our boat (and for us) to get the boat out of the marina, into an open area where she could swing around with the wind. This would allow us to avoid all the projectiles flying through the air (mostly from stuff blowing off the other boats around us, but also from loose stuff on land) and it would also prevent us from slamming into the dock for 4-5 hours while the storm passed through (we had no way of knowing how big the waves in the marina would become in 80-knot winds). And in the unlikely event that there was significant storm surge, we would be relatively unaffected by it at anchor. We selected a location to anchor along the north shore of Greenwich Bay, which would give us moderate wind protection from the east, and good wind protection from the north and west.

I haven’t yet mentioned the fact that Kathryn and Ayla were out of town for the week, so whatever plan Kathryn and I came up with, I was going to have to execute it on my own. I wasn’t too concerned about doing so, but it turned out that our friends on Levity (another Nordhavn 43) decided to also come back to Greenwich Bay to weather the hurricane, so Bill and Rosemary volunteered to help me get the boat off the dock and anchored. They were a big help, and I was thankful to have them here.

So the plan was to get off the dock and anchored Friday morning, and finish all preparations by mid-day. I spent Thursday evening and Friday morning on a variety of preparations:

• Put away anything that wasn’t attached to the boat. This included boat hooks, rugs, shoe bins, etc.
• Remove any “high windage” items that could be broken off in the wind. This included the grill and the television antenna.
• Remove or secure all loose lines and straps around the outside of the boat. For example, we have a couple lines hanging down into our cockpit form which we suspend our hammock.
• Wrap the dingy with additional line, both to hold it down, and also to give the cover more structural integrity.
• Remove the flag pole and any unnecessary antennas. For example, we weren’t going to need AIS during the hurricane, so why risk having the antenna blown off?

We moved the boat out into the anchorage at about 9am, and we deployed two anchors, each with about 150 feet of rode in about 15 feet of water. The second anchor was probably not necessary, but I didn’t want to find out it was necessary when the wind was blowing 80 knots in the dark — better safe than sorry. After the anchors were set, I went about securing the inside of the boat as if we were going to sea. Although the waves probably would not get too large in the anchorage, the boat would still be moving around enough that things could easily fall off their normal places.

By about 11am on Friday I was ready, and Piccadilly and I began waiting for the storm. The winds were expected to begin by early afternoon, and eye of the storm was expected to pass at about midnight. The wind would blow from the east for quite awhile, then blow strongly from the north, and eventually clock around to the west. And so we waited.

In the end, we were waiting for a storm that never came. Two things happened that made our encounter with Earl a non-event. First, he kept inching his way east as he approached New England, putting him farther offshore when he got here. Second, the cooler northern waters weakened him to a tropical storm by the time he passed Rhode Island. In our secure anchorage the wind blew 10-15 knots from the east, and then the north, and then the west (after midnight). When the wind swung around to the west, I knew it was over, and my check of the satellite images confirmed this. I went to bed, and woke up at 5am to 30-knot west winds that were caused by a weather trough that came in after Earl. That’s right: the winds from a normal weather pattern turned out to be much stronger than the winds expected from the storm formerly known as Hurricane Earl. Go figure.

Kathryn and Ayla arrived back to the boat on Saturday, and together we reversed all the preparations. The only difficult part of this was retrieving our second anchor, which had become tangled with our primary anchor chain as we swung around in the changing wind. We got to practice the technique for untangling your anchor from somebody else’s anchor chain — we got to practice it on our own anchor chain!

After a stressful week of planning and preparing, we were all relieved at how it turned out. Unlike Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump who angrily yelled, “Is that all you’ve got!?” into the full-force of a hurricane, we are very happy to call it a dry run, and thank the weather gods for once again sparing us her full fury.