I've wrapped and taped my dorade vents as well.

 

I faired ok the last two Ive been threw. Nothing scientific about how I preped though. Basically turned the boat into a giant spiders web along with fenders and the second one was on the hard and I had several ground spikes don't know what they are called look like a duck bill that when pounded in are a one way trip with a steel cable hanging out depending on the type each one put in 6 to 8" and depending on ground type mine in hard coral could hold more than needed.

Anyway if it can leak it will if it can blow away it will be gone if something else can hit it it will and doesn't matter how well you tie yours down if your neighbor doesn't then will end up same result.

I'm in as much of a hurricane hole as I can be though on an 80' wide canal 5 miles from the gulf up the caloosahatchee River but Irma still took my roof off.

Good luck to everyone and hopefully this will peter out beforehand.

 

At anchor or on a mooring (yes, I've done one of each 🙄) where you have the dinghy behind the boat: pull the plug and it it fill with water. It's less likely to flip.

 

Well… we’ll see how Phil and I respectively fair with our Ian preparations aboard the MacDill AFB marina.

i‘m hoping it isn‘t a repeat of Florence when i would have been just fine, except for the other guys boat that was poorly prepped that broke free and tried to mate with mine…

 

All clear and well for all of us in the base marina. Many folks south of Tampa are in crisis.

 

Lines doubled, canvas stripped, insurance premium paid.... Done....

 

My sail

boat after Hurricane Sandy in NJ. No keel so really buoyant, sitting on stands not a cradle. Tied down with 2" Nylon straps to screw in anchors buried 3 feet deep the day before. Total cost of hurricane prep was $150. Insurance company gave back half of that. The 5 boats piled up against mine didn't actually touch anything other than the straps. There is a Hunter 27 literally balanced upright on it's keel against the pile of boats you see here. These boats are still in the marina unlike the dozens out in the neighborhood!

 

Just back from my marina in Charleston... All in all, we got lucky, the storm came in north of us, so no big storm surge.... But 80 mph wind is no joke..... One boat sank, and about a half dozen had gel coat or canvas damage... Lessons learned.... Take down ALL the canvas... That includes the jib off the furler!!!! At least 3 boats lost their jibs. One was flogging so hard it took out the lower spreaders, but the mast remained upright... The other lesson is tie down your neighbors boat as if it was your own... Almost all the damaged boats were damaged by a neighbor who didn't tie down so well.....

 

I been through several cyclones (our equivilent to your hurricanes). My cruising yacht is trailable so it is kept at home away from trees and structures that can fall. I use star pickets driven deep into the ground and then lash the yacht and trailer down to the ground having removed all the loose rigging, furled headsail and cockpit canvas. No preparation is unexpected happening proof but I sleep a lot better regardless.
I have previously (when young) been out swimming trying to save others moored yachts broken from their moorings in relatively minor cyclonic tail end storms and recently seen the devastation caused by Cyclone Mary to the Whitsundays marinas and moored yachts there. Despite the best laid plans of mice and men it’s hard to deal with your loss when you have done everything right but others boats end up trashing yours.☹

 

This was my prep for Florence in Sept 2018. Boat was aboard MCAS Cherry Point marina; a pretty good hurricane hole off the Neuse River. As suggested above, not only was all canvas stripped, but I completely emptied and stripped the interior of everything not permanently affixed, batteries, cushions, compartment boards, etc, everything. I figured worst case if it got damaged and took water, there‘d be nothing floating around inside as a hazard to enter the boat, or unnecessarily ruined like all the mattresses and cushions, etc.

Doubled all the lines and found other places to add more. I was two weeks from taking command of my squadron and I figured the boat was probbaly not going to be there when I came back and with my looming responsibilities, my sailing would be on hold for a long time. Meanwhile, a much worse event would my boat breaking free and damaging someone else’s due to my negligent failure to prepare as best as possible.

 

 

And you can guess where this is going… Once we were allowed back on base, arriving at the marina was surreal. It received at least a 9’ surge. There were boats in the tree line, boats on the dock, boats in various stages of sinking or just masts above the water. And I would have been fine except for a gent who did marginal prep and left his canvas on.

Sure, it was a hurricane. Mother nature gets a vote. But still…

 

 

Fortunately aside from his deck hardware chewing up the port amidships and rub rail, and his forestay chattering up some of the foil sections of my furler, and a couple bent life line stancions, everything was eventually repaired. Unfortunately it took over a year given all the yards in the area took their own sever damage and then the backlog of work. But the silver lining was that during that time on the hard I pretty much we through every possible thing to fix or clean up when I had the time.

But now I am just hyper aware that when a major storm is approaching, it is one thing to prep my boat, but if someone else is doing a half ass job, I’ll happily lend some lines! And thank goodness I was home when Ian passed by!

 

I've done the same but left the batteries onboard with the bilge pump on auto. I also drop the boom and either lash it to the deck or bring it below and tie it down.

 

Tempest, solid points. At the time I did not have an electric bilge pump - these Pearson 28-2s didn't have them from the factory, just the manual pump. I've since installed an electric pump and for Ian's passage made sure the batteries were fully charged and left in the boat...

 

Bird Dog, I just discovered your posts. I was upstream from you at Northwest Creek Marina on D-dock for Florence. I had an empty slip to my north and both of my stern piles had Pile Mates on them. I did not trust the Pile Mates and ran a Dacron line (ex genoa sheet) across the fairway behind my boat to the adjacent dock's piles to hold my boat's bow off the dock should the Pile Mates fail. I put lines across the empty slip to resist the winds I expected from that direction. The bow lines to the dock were long and were moved to the cleats across the dock before the weather went foul. I expected the longer lines to allow the boat to rise even after the marina staff could no longer adjust dock lines. All the canvas came off the boat along with the BBQ, dinghy outboard, Life Sling, cowls, and all. Like you, I did not expect the boat to survive. I left most things aboard because without the boat I would not need them.

We got 12 ft of surge. That put the docks maybe 10 ft underwater. My boat survived. Others did not. As the water dropped in the morning after the storm, my boat was positioned to come down in its slip. Others were not. The red boat struct mine, but did little damage; my anchors did more to her. She came down on the dock. Another slip owner and I tied her mast to keep her from falling over, and she was removed with a crane. The white boat came down on a finger pier, fell over, flooded and sunk as the water receded. This picture is well after the worst of it. The Pile Mates on the dock behind me came off over the tops of their pilings, but another boat owner re-tied mine to the naked pile. One of my two stern Pile Mates also escaped.

The damage on the dock was real. This was D-dock from the main dock as the water went down.

Most of the damage was caused by the Pile Mates coming off over the tops of the pilings during the high water. The parts of the marina without the Pile Mates had little damage.

The electricity and water to the dock were destroyed. We prepped the for the Bahamas in January that winter with a Honda generator running on the dock for heat and electricity. The electricity was repaired a week or two before we returned in the spring. This was the first real damage that the marina had suffered since its building in the 80's.

 

wsmurdoch, too bad we didn’t make acquaintance when we were there those couple years! The carnage at the MCAS Cherry Point dock was similar. Many docks had chunks out of their plank because as boats lifted in the surge and broke free, their keels smashed the dock walkways as they bobbed over into other boats, the tree line, or eventually the bottom. It was sad.

And it is relative to ***** about a negligent dock mate who does a poor prep job and his boat scrapes up mine, when others, with some NICE high dollar sailboats who did everything right, only to have the combination of the winds and surge ending up having their hulls breached on a piling too and then sunk.

I’ll have to find the pic of the one gents boat that had a wing keel that must have been perfectly flat on the bottom; it was sitting in the parking lot upright, with its mast against a tall pine tree. And not to worse for wear!