Hurricane Comin’ - Part Two:

Living Through The Night

In A Storm

Story and Photos by David H. Lyman

Originally published in published June 2020 2020 edition of Caribbean Compass magazine.

In last month’s issue of Compass, we left the author standing in the cabin of his 41-foot Lord Nelson sailboat, Afaran. Hurricane Hugo was approach- ing. He had two storm anchors down in Coral Harbor, St. John, USVI. Would it be enough?

As darkness fell, I was standing in the cabin pondering the worst. Was my boat really ready? Should I stay aboard or go ashore? Hurricane Hugo was less than 24 hours away, bearing down on the islands with 140-knot winds.

     “The first lesson, when in trouble,” I said out loud to myself, “is to seek local knowledge.” I needed to talk to someone.

     It was 6:00pm; happy hour would be in full swing ashore at Skinny Leg’s Bar and Grill. I replaced the electronics, stowed the tools, grabbed my wallet, jumped into the dinghy and sped ashore.

     I pulled up a stool next to a burly Kiwi, his wife and teenage daughter. Derek, I knew. He was the mechanic at Cruz Bay Shipyard. He knew me and had worked on my boat.

Deciding to Stay Aboard

   “You all set?” he asked. “I saw you found yourself a sweet spot.” He and his family lived in Coral Harbor, on their 50-foot ketch, HOTTYD

(Hold On Tight To Your Dreams). They were moored on the other side of the harbor from me.

     I knew Derek was an experienced seaman, so I pumped him for advice.

     “The winds in this hurricane are supposed to blow over 140 knots,” I said, sipping my first Red Stripe.

     “Yup.” A man of few words.

     “It blew 115 during Hurricane Emily two years ago when I was in Bermuda,” I added. “It only lasted an hour, but that was enough for me. If we are going to be in 140-knot winds for ten to 12 hours, I don’t see how any boat can survive.”

     “It can be done,” said Derek, slowly, nursing what must have been his third Red Stripe.

     “Are you staying on your boat or going ashore?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine he’d subject his wife and daughter to a storm this strong for so long.

     “Stay with your boat,” he said. “Protecting your boat... it’s your responsibility. Just check the chafe gear every half an hour. It’s the one thing you can do to ensure you have a boat the next day.”

     “How can you see anything with the wind blowing a hundred miles an hour?” I asked. This was the one thing I remembered from Hurricane Emily in Bermuda. I had been blinded by the wind-driven spray and rain. “Try sticking your head out the car window in a rainstorm driving along at 80,” I’d tell friends when I recounted my Bermuda story. “Tell me if you can see anything.”

     “Use a mask and snorkel,” replied Derek. “Crawl forward every half an hour, inspect and adjust the chafe gear. Most of the damage done to boats at anchor or on a mooring during a storm comes from mooring lines that chafe through. How much scope you have down?” Derek asked.

     “Two hundred feet on each anchor. The 60-pound CQR on chain. My storm anchor, a 90-pound Fisherman, on two five-eighth-inch nylon rodes.”

     “That should do it. I’ll be up all night. Same as you, I imagine.”

     I ordered Derek another Red Stripe, and all four of us tucked into a dinner of conch fritters and fries at the bar.

Back on board that night I made the commitment to remain on the boat. Under an almost full moon, I removed the outboard engine and secured it in the cockpit, hauled the dinghy on deck with the main halyard, deflated it and packed it in its bag, securing it to the life raft just ahead of the mast. Then I went to bed. It was 11:00pm. The night was full of dreams — huge waves, pounding surf — the feeling of being underwater, rolled around in the surf, left me dazed in the morning. Or might it have been the beers from the night before?

Sunday, September 17th, 1989

The day was still and hot. There was nothing more I could think of that needed doing. I sat on the foredeck on the rolled-up dinghy and read The Cardinal in the Kremlin by Tom Clancy. Boats continued to arrive all morning. Some attempted to anchor in front of me. I sent them away.

     In the afternoon, high thin clouds began to cover the eastern sky. It was kinda hard to contemplate what was about to happen in a few hours, but the VHF and the land-based AM radio stations were full of it.

     Hugo had slammed Guadeloupe that morning, at 1:00am. Winds to 140 miles per hour, 20-foot waves and a two-to three-foot surge. A dozen people killed. The anticipated path of Hugo would bring it directly over the Virgin Islands from Sunday evening into Monday morning.

     “The hurricane is expected to pass between St. Croix and the BVI as a Category 4 hurricane,” reported the mechanical voice on WX VHF. “Winds in excess of 140 knots out to 100 miles on the northeast quadrant.” This meant boats anchored in Cruz Bay would be on the “dangerous side” as the storm approached. The winds would be rotating counterclockwise around the eye; the storm’s forward movement (eight to 12 knots) would be added to its 140-knot winds, increasing the true wind to 150 knots.

     As the day went on reports came in that Hugo had slowed down, traveling at six to eight knots. This would lessen the winds a bit, but extend the time we would be in them. Tough trade-off.

     Boats were now anchored all around me in Coral Bay — big boats, little boats. One 90-footer from Hamilton, Bermuda, dropped a single anchor, and left their sails on and their dinghy tied off astern. Others dropped only one anchor, packed up and went ashore. Maybe they knew something I didn’t. If I had my dinghy in the water, I’d have gone over to chat with Derek.

By 6:00pm, as dusk arrived, so did the tendrils of wind, the

outriders of the hurricane. At first I thought the roaring

sound overhead was low-flying military jets on recon. Then I saw what made the screaming noise: shafts of wind, tunnels really, no wider than a street, swept down from the sky, hit the water at the far edge of the moored fleet, and shot across the harbor, tearing up the water, kicking up spray, knocking boats flat, roaring up the hillside, stripping leaves from the trees, leaving brown wakes in their paths of snapped trees and torn-up brush. This went on as darkness fell. I sat on the life raft forward and watched.

Then, the rain began, not all at once, but in fits and starts, along with the wind that came and went. I went below and stuffed a can of Dinty Moore into my stomach, put on my foul weather jacket, pulled the hood over my head, and strapped a dive mask over the hood to keep it in place. I was not about to leave my bald head unprotected. I would be spending the entire night on the foredeck, crammed in between the windlass and the bulwarks, out of the wind.

By 10:00pm we were in it. The winds were east, so the harbor was in the lee of the hills, but the wind reached us. As night wore on the winds crept around to south-east, then south, as the eye of Hugo moved slowly to the west-northwest.

     Gusts came and went, blowing well over 100 knots.

     As I learned later, the eye passed directly over St. Croix, 30 miles south of Coral Bay. For much of the night, the wind was out of the southeast and south, hovering between 80 and 120 knots, blowing directly into the harbor. As the wind came south, five- to ten-foot swells swept into the harbor. Afaran rose to meet the swells, only to plunge down into the troughs. I was worried we might hit the bottom as some of the swells must have been ten to 15 feet in depth, but the surge had increased the depth. We bottomed out only twice, with a thud.

     I heeded Derek’s advice and throughout the night remained on the foredeck. I lay there in the dark, the wind shrieking through my boat’s rigging. I noticed it went up an octave as the wind increased, then back down. The air was full of rain and spray blown off the tops of breaking waves. A gust of wind hit the boat, she reared back like a horse, stretching out the nylon lines. With my flashlight, I watched one of the two rodes on the Yachtsman stretch out, then the second line take up the load as it stretched. The snubbing line on the anchor chain stretched out, then the chain became taut as the boat was pushed back. All it would take was one weak link to break, a shackle to part, an anchor to break free from the sand and it would be all over.

     When a gust retreated, I watched in amazement as Afaran was snapped forward. The tension on the nylon lines relaxed, the boat returned to its original location, the anchor lines hanging vertically off the bow. The stretch of the nylon rodes acted like a rubber band. How much of this could my ground tackle take before something burst?

     Every so often the night was ablaze with light. On HOTTYD, Derek had fired up his big searchlight and he swept the harbor to see what was happening. I raised my face over the gunnel and followed the light. With each sweep fewer and fewer yachts remained at anchor, more and more of them were piled up on the beach.

     All night Derek and I kept vigil, and a good thing. The rodes and snubber line that ran over the bronze rollers on Afaran’s bowsprit had been working and a nut at one end of the roller shaft had fallen off. Every 15 minutes, I’d crawl forward, hang out over the bowsprit and bang the shaft back into place with a hammer. If I’d not been there, the shaft would have worked its way out, the rollers would have jammed, and the lines would have chafed through.

     Every hour or so I crawled on all fours back to the cockpit to check the wind speed and barometer. Steady at 100 knots. As I tapped the barometer glass, the needle would jump down — the hurricane was still advancing on us.

     Around 2:00 in the morning as I was standing at the galley drinking a glass of water, a blinding flash of light and a simultaneous loud CRASH startled me. The transformer on the pole by the beach had blown? No, lightning had struck my mast-head, blowing out the VHF antenna and the wind-speed indicator, now locked at 90 knots. But I didn’t discover that until the next morning.

     Back on deck, it was 4:00am and things were at their worst. Derek’s spotlight revealed that most of the boats that had been anchored in the harbor were missing. The 90-foot Bermuda yacht was ashore, having taken two others with it. I tucked my head back down as the wind shrieked overhead, tearing at my foul weather jacket.

     The noise was deafening, like standing on a NYC subway platform as the express comes through.

     My mind was flitting between “what else I can do?” and memories of warm nights in the south of France with a lovely dark-haired French lady seated across from me. “Why the hell am I here?” I asked myself. Haven’t you found out yet?

     I was halfway between awake and asleep, at the time of night when dreams flood in. To keep awake, I tried to calculate the forces that were attacking my boat. When I was in engineering school I knew formulas to calculate drag and wind pressure. I’d need paper and pencil to figure that out now. I sent my mind down the anchor chain to inspect the links and shackle, then down the rode to the Fisherman. “Looks good,” I report-ed back. I’m hallucinating.

     I asked myself, “Are you scared?” No. Worried, yes, but since we’d come this far, I knew the storm will not kill me. It might damage my boat, but I would survive.

     It was about then that the hurricane and I came to terms. I could be with the experience, not frozen in panic by it. It was like skiing slightly out of control down a double black diamond trail: “The thrill is just this side of disaster.”

     Then I noticed it was getting lighter. Was the end in sight?

     We’ll find out the the next issue.

Click here to read the final report.