October 30th 2007 Hurricane Alley

Mid August saw Julie & I really trying to get our heads around the scope of the catamaran rebuilding project in front of us. The first thing tackled was removing all the materials that were loose from the inside of the boat. This included all the old headliners.... There were 33 of them so we carried them up to the Cassita (Our Cottage).

Julie busied herself removing all the old material from the plywood, pulling all the staples, then waterproofing. In the meantime I busied myself pulling out all the Settee area which included the main table (seats 10) and the benches themselves. The bottoms of everything was rotted out by water which had been sitting in the boat for years.

Not only were we working on the "Cat" we were also busy with the Colorado College group of 10 students and teachers. Everyone was busy snorkeling, kayaking and hiking.

By August 17th we were becoming concerned that Hurricane Dean in the Atlantic. As the days went by it was increasingly evident that we were right in the path of a major category 5 storm. What to do?

Mango Creek located on the Soth West end of Roatan would be protected by the mountains if the storm went north of the island. But still this would be a monster storm.

We had four boats to take care of plus battening down the lodge. The boats need to be moved off the docks to moorings but we had only two moorings and even they would have to be shored up.

The decision was made to get busy and put down two new moorings with sand screws and barrels of concrete. Each mooring would have three lines down to the concrete and screws. Heavy duty shackles and lines were to be attached.

It was a Chinese fire drill. Empty barrels & bags of cement were bought from Oak Ridge. Gravel was dug out of our creek and sand was already piled up.

Our cement mixer was soon pulled out and all the men on the property were soon at work mixing concrete. Re-Bar was set in each barrel along with a chunk of chain for good measure.

Now the problem was how to get the heavy barrels out to the mooring locations. No problemo: make a raft. Four hours later the raft was made using rough lumber and empty plastic diesel barrels. 

Only one barrel at a time could be moved on the raft and Kessel was used as human ballast to balance the raft from tipping its load. A large ship's mooring ball was tied to the barrel just in case the raft flipped.  The "Sea Calf" (our dingy) was used to tow the raft out.

With all 4 moorings now in place we turned to getting the lodge ready for the storm. All fishing skiffs and the panga were pulled up on shore. The refrigerators and perishables were lifted high off the restaurant floor. Bedding in the Cabañas were moved to the attics. On and on. Everyone worked hard at getting things ready.

The night of August 20th the Hurricane would pass 150 north of us. Tie Tie, Miguel and myself did anchor watches aboard three of the boats. The Catamaran was left to fend for itself. The boats were the 32 sports fisherman, the 61 Deerfoot, the 44 Free Radical, and the Catamaran. It was a non event the most we saw was 30K winds with some uncomfortable waves.

The next day we started putting everything back the way it was.

With everything back to normal we swung our focus back on the boat project.