Goodnight Irene

Yesterday, Tuesday at 4pm our power, phone and high speed internet were restored...ahh!

We weathered Irene without mishap.

Because of the wind direction, initially NNE and later NNW, we were in the shadow of the woods in front of our home. A bit of an island of calmer winds compared to the whipping we saw all around us. The worst winds occurred late Saturday night and into Sunday morning.
Of course it was pitch black at that time so hard to see any detail. It was reported to be sustained winds of 60mph with gust up to 70mph. I could not validate that from our home weather station because I was asleep but think in our small sheltered cove we did not see anything over 50mph and only as a gust. Across from us on Indian Creek it was likely they had greater exposure and took a bigger hit. We could see the waves from the south side of the creek piling up and over the rip rap.

The storm surge locally was limited by wind direction which for the most part pushed water out of our cove while the storm in general was pushing water into the Bay. Our surge was about 4.5-5' at the highest.

We have a whole house 45kw generator and were quite comfortable when we lost power early Sunday morning. The generator did give us some fits with an incorrect temperate sensor that needed to be re-calibrated after which it ran like a champ. We did have limited internet through a MIFI card but it was painfully slow so we were limited to emails for the most part.

Our tideslide performed quite well during the storm. The boat remained centered in our slip and the fenders on both sides of the boat did not come in contact with either the pilings on the port side or the starboard side dock. It rode up the surge and back down. The dock was underwater for a brief period at the height of the storm surge.

We have four tide slides, two on each side, fore and aft. On each tide slide, the lines were arranged so in effect the boat was spider webbed in the slip. Each tide slide had two 3/4" lines set up as you can see, one fore and one aft.







In this pre-storm picture I did not rig this line correctly. As you can see the lines come out of the block and one is fore and the other is aft. The forward line loops around from behind and this was a mistake on my part. I had some chafing on the forward line as the wind pushed the boat back and the aft line tugged, the block pushed against the piling, chafing that line.

In the future I would rig these lines differently and have both lines coming out of the same side of the block.

The question came up recently about how the slides are secured to the pilings. There are 2 SS large bolts that are through the pilings and secured with washers and nuts, on the other side and two large SS lag bolts about 6" into the piling, top and bottom. The stern has two pilings and the bow had three. The third was added so the tide slide would have the needed height.
These are not coming out anytime soon.

A new storm has developed named Katia but at this point it does not look to be a threat.
wunderground. Best to keep our eye on things.