We Survived Hurrican Jamica

Sunday, September-06-09

We have all been glued to the radios and weather reports for days, and confusion reigns. On Monday, the hurricane was heading here for sure, probably going to hit at Mag bay and work its way inland thru the mountains, on Tues it was going to head out to sea, and maybe hit the coast up by Turtle bay, Whew, we would get missed. It was a category 5, 2, 3, 4, or tropical storm, pick your choice. Good clear directions and reports. We got NOA weather, fox weather, you name the initials, we got it all, and as I said confusion reigned. And it still does, some reports say that it is turning around and heading back, so we are delaying putting up all the sails again.

On Tues we were finished clearing the boat of what we thought we would need to take off, and so went in to lunch at the dock, and as we were finishing lunch the first squall hit. Of course the boat was all open, the windows and the hatches. the sun was shinning when we left, and the last word we had was it wasn’t going to be here until probably Thurs. so all in all we were a little relaxed. We hopped in the dingy and dashed to the boat, got soaking wet, and oh…… so did the boat, inside and out. Took us no time to close the windows and hatches of course, and I had to dig out a blow up mattress to put on the bed so we could sleep on Tues night, but no real harm was done. Gary’s Mac got a ton of water, but he put a fan in it and it decided to work again. For how long is anyone’s guess.

And that was my official start of our part of the hurricane. We had squalls all day, and by night they were blowing rather well. I must say that Puerto Escondido is a great hurricane hole, and compared to the other places on the coast we got off rather lightly, but it was my first hurricane and it was rather frightening. High winds, some gusts got to 85,88,90,95, pick which you like, it depends on whose wind vane worked best. The noise was the worst. It howled, some times it sounded like a supersonic jet coming across the anchorage. Rain and spray of course, you couldn’t see 10 feet sometimes, and of course when the gusts went across the bay we were tossed from one side to the other. And ours is a 40,000 pound boat. It seemed to go on forever, by 6 Wed night we figured they could turn off the fan anytime, but it blew all night the second night too. Of course we got no sleep, what with dashing to the deck to check lines, and watch the other boats to see that they didn’t break loose and smack into us, it wasn’t very restful.

By noon on Thurs. the weather had abated and the squalls were settling down, so everyone could breath a bit. I dragged my computer to shore to send emails to the family, but no luck, all the power and phones etc. are down and probably will be for days. So this will be rather later than I thought.

Listening to the nets on the other places in the sea, most of them got hit way worse than us. We only had 4 boats break loose, 2 ended up on the beach, one let loose on Thurs. morning and they got it before it went too far, and one boat had the owner aboard and he managed to get it re-anchored without too much trouble. So luck was with us.

It is now Friday morning and the planning party is on shore at this time putting together a party for tomorrow to celebrate the “ I survived Hurricane Jamica “. So it will be cruising as usual. The funniest thing that I heard this week came from one of the boats after they announced that we weren’t going to get the full brunt of the hurricane (they were wrong, we did) anyway, this woman came on the radio and she said “ we have just spent hours getting our fully battened main off the boat, I am going to be disgusted if I was all for nothing!!!” (It wasn’t)

Sunday, Sept 6/09

Had the party, of course we bugged out early, too much for us "old timers" when it starts to get noisy we leave. We are mostly recovered, has taken us a few days to get over the stress, it is amazing how many aches and pains you get when you are stressed. Tomorrow morning we will be off again to the north this time, to see all the neat places that we have never been to. And of course hopefully the cell towers will be back up, and we can get reception. Altho it seems rather shallow to worry about cell reception when there are lots of people still lost in floods, and some have no housing or water or electricity. I guess we will run into that as we go north, at least for the next 75 miles or so.

In the meantime we will have fair winds and lovely sailing.