Good Night, Irene

  

Wayward Wind on Mooring Ball 71

We swayed.  We gently swung.  Occasionally we jerked.  But we stayed put and, thankfully, so did our neighbors.  Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time she visited Annapolis.  Here in Spa Creek, the sustained wind was in the low 40 knots with the highest gust recorded by neighbor Gordon on N’Aimless at 47 knots.  It reminded me of a bad California winter storm except that it lasted for nearly two days.  The peak winds were on Saturday night from around 8:00pm till 12:00am though it was blowing heavily all day Saturday and most of the day Sunday.  On Saturday evening, after dinner, Dave and I sat in the cockpit playing gin rummy while enjoying a vodka tonic.  (Yes, even Dave had one!)  On a side note, early on, I was up by nine games, but he wound up winning by one game.  I blame / he credits the vodka. 

Sometime in the late afternoon, we heard a knock on our boat, “Wayward Wind!”  We came out in the blowing rain to find Jeff and Stan, who’d donned their foulies looking up from Stan’s dinghy, smilingly asking us if we wanted to join them on Simpatico because they’d heard that dinner was cooking.  They looked like a couple of kids on an adventure.  But that image was slightly altered when Stan asked for a vodka tonic although he DID have boyish grin.

On our end of the creek, we had no boat damage.  Farther downstream, however, sometime on Saturday night, an old Hans Christian with a big bow sprit drug anchor right between Stan’s and Jeff’s boats and plowed into a power boat, Wat a Joy, punching several holes into its hull.  What a drag!

Our little group of boats and another group of boaters who were at docks monitored Channel 69 on the VHF radio.  The boaters at the docks had internet access, so we heard their periodic weather updates.  We went to sleep around midnight.  Dave got up a couple of times to check on things.  I slept till 4:15 and Dave slept later.  We were grateful for the decent night’s sleep.  By morning, the rain was on and off though the wind was still blowing fairly hard.  By mid-morning, the rain stopped and by mid-afternoon, the edge of Irene’s cloud tail passed overhead.  The wind continued to blow until the evening when finally it was as calm as could be.  Irene, good night.