Hurricane Season, Storm "Ileana"

I am not superstitious.

Well, maybe just a littlestitious, so I post this only now, with official hurricane season behind us and the first cold weather of the season finally upon us. It felt like posting early could have jinxed us!

Di and I have a bit more hurricane experience than we'd really like. We had a number of them come over our house in Panama City, Florida and a few more in Baytown, Texas. We always did well, and got lucky a few times, including when hurricane "Katrina" was headed straight for our house back in 2005 only 24 hours before making landfall. Eventually, weather update after weather update, it deviated West doing untold damages in New Orleans and sparing Panama City.

Later, we survived hurricane "Ike", a category 5 monster just before it came ashore as a cat 4, on our 26 foot sailboat well hidden deep in a hurricane hole, 30 miles up a river, tied to strong trees and pilings with 3 anchors deployed for extra safety.

A huge wave slamming into our containers. The top row of container is the 4th stack, and got destroyed. That stack is over 20 meters above the waterline

Years ago, I went through a category 3 hurricane in the North Atlantic on a small ice class container ship. The weather reports and forecasts for our zone had what weather men call "significant wave heights" of 13 to 17 meters, which means we also had some much larger ones regularly. Without going into the official statistical definition of significant height, about 1 in 1,000 wave can be almost double that height. In non scientific terms: huge and dangerous.

Last year, both La Paz, a little further South of Loreto, and Acapulco, on the Pacific side way South of us, received significant damages from late season fast developing hurricanes.

It's always hard to get a sense of scale. The lifeboat is just under 30 feet long

The morning after hurricane Ike. We had winds of up to 145 knots overnight in our safe hurricane hole. Waters are still very high from storm surge

Not all boats successfully weathered hurricane Ike. This poor fishing boat ended up in the middle of the forrest due to winds and storm surge

Our local marina lifted from its pilings and all the boats were pushed ashore. Literally hundreds of boats lost that day

Our house survived hurricane Ike -barely- but our yard and dock needed a lot of work. Almost all our neighbors' houses were destroyed

So when it came time to decide what to do during this summer's hurricane season we planned on being ultra careful. We could head back up to Ensenada, where the cold waters of the Pacific make it extremely rare any significant hurricane can reach.

Or we could seek a safe refuge in the Gulf of California and save ourselves the hard 700 miles trek back up. Our initial insurance wanted us to be North of 26 degrees of latitude, but we soon realized that the best refuge was just below that, in Puerto Escondido. The hidden port in Spanish.

When renewing our insurance I therefore sought to find one that would accept our plan of staying there, and luckily after weeks and weeks of discussions with many brokers and underwriters we got coverage from a world wide insurer. Underwriters even commented very favorably on our extensive hurricane experience and my hurricane plan. I wonder how many people can answer "yes" with multiple examples to the question "have you got experience of hurricanes on a boat?".

Puerto Escondido is an amazing closed in bay with a small entrance. The combination of the natural bay, the man made jetties and docks make for a really safe shelter. Even better, our assigned dock is deep into the canal complex, providing even more shelter in strong winds.

The large bay is at the foot of huge mountains on which most systems should start slowing down and dying. It's a hidden and as safe as anyone can find.

inredibly shelterd Marina Puerto Escondido. Our boat is the red triangle

So when storm "Ileana" formed South of us, offshore Cabo, we had quiet confidence we'd be OK. Obviously I kept a close eye on the weather forecast and trajectory. One thing I've found over the years is that while sudden strengthening of storms remains hard to predict, like last years' 2 Mexican storms on the Pacific side, it seems storm paths forecasts are getting more accurate over the years.

Our biggest worry were the incredibly hot local water temperatures, at almost 34c (93f), raising the risk of sudden explosive intensification. Last year's storm in Acapulco went from tropical storm to Cat 5 in about a day.

"Ileana" became the talk of the marina. Friends on a sister Nordhavn came back early to be there should the storm hit, while Di and I spent a little time checking up on various other friends' boats. Most owners had maintenance contracts with a local company which did a great job at securing boats further, taking awning downs and more.

We're in the warning zone already

On Enfin I added plenty of lines, up to 12 lines total, and had almost all our fenders dock side. I once again checked the engines were ready to fire up, just in case storm surge came up so high our dock started lifting off its pilings.

We cleaned up our cockpit and decks of the various stuff that tends to pile up when we stay too long in a marina, and decided to keep an eye on things further before taking our enclosure completely down. We'd taken its sides off already.

Slowly, update after update, the storm took the most easterly side of the initial cone of incertitude, and pretty soon we were safe, both on the left side of the storm and far away.

We saw local winds of only about 30 knots, so were never at any risk.

With the official season now behind us, and a late storm still possible but unlikely, we can now start thinking of resuming our long distance cruising. We'll first start with some local cruises to get back in the groove, complete our provisioning and finish some of the summer tasks.

And because I'm only a littlestitious, I'll keep a firm eye on the storm forecasts anyway.