I awoke like everyone in the Bay Area on Friday morning to a ‘war’ zone – hurricane force winds and torrential rain. Not a day to be out on a boat but to be by a wood fire or in an office in front of a computer. I received a phone call from one of my parent’s tenants that the front gate was pulling itself to pieces. As I walked out of the door the skylight (6 foot by 2.5 feet) that hadn’t been screwed down on the porch roof went airborne and landed on the concrete pathway with a crash right next to me. The glass some how didn’t break but the metal frame was a little damaged.   In my infinite wisdom I was wearing ‘smart’ clothing as I didn’t intend to do any manual labor that day. I had a meeting in Tiburon but as it was blowing dogs of chains and raining buckets I was wearing my Hunter wellies. It was near high tide so 101N ramp was flooded and I had to divert. After my meeting I headed to the yacht club to check in on my brother’s boat and my customers boats. So you would have thought I would be warm and dry seeing as I have four sets of HPX Musto hanging in my cupboard as well as a dry suit – but no – I was in chinos and a windstopper fleece!  All hell was breaking loose at the YC (pictures below taken by John Arndt at CYC) the tide was up to within 3 feet of the top of the breakwater and the visibility was bad.

 

It was blowing so hard the waves had flattened out and there was a wall of salt water spray coming at me as I attempted to walk down the docks. The last boat I checked in on was lying against the boat next door and the bow was up against the dock. The chain that held the aft leading spring and stern line to the tire on the end of the dock had snapped! You could have thought the line would go before the chain I guess the line being nylon was stretching. As the boat was bow on the dock I was able to climb on the bow and found some mooring lines to re secure the boat. Lesson learnt – always have two different chains and not connect two lines to the same chain – that way you might only lose one line and not two. Luckily there was no damage to the bow or the side of the boat as fenders were out in between the boats. I called the owner and left a message telling her I had been aboard. On a boat across the way a jib had half unfurled itself creating a large pocket of sail which was catching the wind and slamming the boat to a 30% angle away from the dock threatening to interlock it’s mast with the neighbors boat. The jib was going to rip itself to shreds. I asked someone on the dock if the harbor master needed help securing the jib – the only way I thought we could do it assuming we could actually get on the boat was to wrap a halyard around the forestay many times and then use a winch to winch the halyard tight and collapse the sail. Apparently the owner had been informed and didn’t want anything to be done.  Lesson learnt – always secure the furling drum (the line was missing from the drum so it was able to turn) and also put a sail tie through the clew and around the sail when leaving the boat for a while. After checking in with the boats and being drenched through it was time to go around my parents rental properties to see if there was any major damage. I was pretty much the only person out on the roads. In total we lost about 50 feet of fencing, a shed, a honeysuckle vine as the lattice it was climbing blew down, quite a few limbs off a cypress tree, a skylight, a gate and power for the day. I went to the hardware store (the normal one I go to was flooded) the only place open in town Mill Valley (the center was a ghost town) there were people asking for flashlights – the owner was laughing he had sold out 4 hours before, the phone was ringing continuously with people wanting generators! When I got back to my house there was quite a few large branches down from the cypress tree unfortunately they had fallen into the neighbours yard and straddled the fence.  

So it was time to use the trusty De Walt sawzall my brother had given me for Christmas last year. It worked a treat. Three hours later I had a pick up truck full of branches ready for a dump run on Saturday morning. So you can imagine what the rest of my weekend involved! Fences, dump runs, lots of mud and rain J Monday 4am I am off to LA to work on a 40 footer as I am project managing the building of it. Have a great week.