Hurricane Prep

It seems that to take a step forward involves three steps forwards and two steps backwards. So much time is spent cleaning boats, and taking care of them, that to make forward progress on a restoration, many steps are taken both ways. Today, I prepared ECHO for hurricane Irene. I am now ready for it.

The image shows the date and time and the little blue dot is New York City. I'm on the top right edge of that blue dot in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Fortunately for me, I have one of the best locations to ride out a storm. I'm deep in a harbor, so there will be no significant wave action. The last place I kept my boat was pounded in a storm. I have a video and some pictures of that. Waves were breaking across the dock. That won't happen this time.


I have a couple of concerns. One is I don't trust my finger pier dock. It has a weak link at one end, so I have run dock lines to the next nearest finger pier and to the main dock.

One of the hardest jobs was removing my mainsail. The cover came off easy enough. The main sail is about 80 lbs. I had to disconnect my Dutchman system, unshackle a few stubborn parts, and get the sail off the mast track and then the boom. Then I had a huge pile of sail on my deck and by myself, it would have been impossible to fold it. I tied it in as compact a bundle as I could and use a spinnaker halyard to hoist it over the lifelines, and got it onto the dock. I dragged it to the bottom of the gangway which was unfortunately at low tide. A friend helped me get it to the top and into my wagon. Hard work. I was exhausted and needed a break. Now I have to do some prep work at home to prepare for the storm. Predicted wind speed is 80 mph. 60 mph rain will sting. 80 mph is significant. The above photo was taken at low tide, at high tide the dock will probably be higher than the parking lot and the lot will be flooded. There is a danger the dock could float off the top of the pilings. That is not very likely. I plan to fill up my pickup truck with fuel and I may load it up with gear for extra weight, as I plan to drive around in the storm since it will hit in day time. I am hoping the tide will be down when the storm surge hits.

I was surprised to see people pulling there boats out from our dock area. I expected people to be bringing boats into this dock, not taking them out, due to the protected nature of this area.


Lots of people are on moorings. These people will find their boats broken loose and on the beach on Monday. Those are the people who should be hauling out or moving down to where I am. there is space on my dock.

To the left is a close up of the maze of lines I'm using to secure my boat. I added a few more fenders. The reason I have so many lines is I don't truck the dock cleats. One failed cleat, or one dock line parted, and my boat could swing free or pound against the dock. So redundancy is good, even though it looks silly to have so many dock lines. Notice I have bow lines, stern lines, spring lines and breast lines. I have at least two of each.

This is hard to see. The pipe used to secure this dock is bent badly I plan to add some more dock lines between the main dock and the finger pier, and also move one line across to the other finger pier.