How to Prepare Your Boat for a Storm

Many of the above items will require a substantial amount of time to complete, considerably more than can be accomplished when a hurricane threatens your area. Chandleries will run out of gear quickly when a hurricane looms. After developing your survival plan, purchase and assemble the gear you need to implement it.

Finally, leave early! Waiting to take action until a storm’s imminent arrival is inviting disaster. A hurricane warning is issued when sustained winds exceeding 64 knots are expected within 24 hours. Hurricane-proofing your house or evacuating the area will take precedence over boat safety. Winds may rise quickly. Securing a boat in 35-knot winds is extremely difficult; it’s impossible in 45-knot winds.

A hurricane watch is issued when hurricane conditions pose a threat to a specific coastal area within 36 hours. Drawbridges may be locked down after a watch is issued. You may find your secluded hurricane hole or protected canal inaccessible or already filled with boats.

Start moving as soon as you feel a hurricane watch is probable. Don’t rely on emergency services for assistance. Many harbor and marine patrols remove their vessels from the water or sequester them prior to the onset of storm and hurricane force winds.

After you’ve secured your boat, double-check everything. Turn off all electrical power except the bilge pumps. Test bilge pump switches and pump intakes for debris.

Don’t stay on your boat! Fifty percent of all hurricane-related deaths occur from boat owners trying to secure their boats in deteriorating conditions. Develop a well-thought-out hurricane plan, be prepared to implement it in the shortest possible time and, when completed, leave the boat to its own survival. There is absolutely nothing you can do when hurricane force winds are screaming across the deck.

It’s been decades since William Redfield’s serendipitous discovery of the rotary motion of tropical storms. And the cirrus clouds first observed by Father Benito Viñes still race across a clear, blue, tropical sky ahead of an approaching hurricane. His early warning system has been replaced by weather satellites and advanced computer forecasting systems. Scientists can now predict, with reasonable accuracy, the approximate number of tropical storms and hurricanes that will form in a given season. Watchful electronic eyes constantly beam down updates of their wanderings as they relentlessly gnaw and churn across their expansive ocean feeding grounds.

But the best efforts to predict the path or the intensity of a storm at a given moment still escapes even the best scientists and the most advanced computers. Vilhelm Bjerknes, an eminent meteorologist, accurately describes the physicist’s present attempts at hurricane forecasting: We are in a position of the physicist watching a pot of water coming to a boil. He knows intimately all the processes of energy transfer, molecular kinetics and thermodynamics involved. He can describe them, put them in the form of formulas and tell you a great deal about how much heat will boil how much water. Now ask him to predict precisely where the next bubble will form.

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Related Books:
Complete Book Of Anchoring And Mooring, Second edition, by Earl Hinz (Cornell Maritime Press).

A Guide To Preparing Boats And Marinas For Hurricanes, free from BOAT/U.S. (800 South Pickett St., Alexandria, VA 22304).

Preparing Your Boat For A Hurricane, Sea Grant College of the State University of Florida (Monroe County Cooperative Extension Service, 5100 College Rd., Key West, FL 33040).

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Ed Eisenberger is an independent marine electronics consultant and the electronics manager for West Marine in Key Largo, Florida. He lives aboard and sails his 41-foot ketch, Wandering Star, from which he keeps a close eye on the weather.