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| Caribbean Property Magazine Home / September 2009 / '20th Anniversary of Hugo: Surviving Hugo Part 1 of 2' | SEND THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND  |
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S E P T E M B E R
 2 0 0 9Issue 32
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20th Anniversary of Hugo: Surviving Hugo Part 1 of 2
By Deb Andrews 29. Sept.1989 A Liveaboard Mariner’s tale of Hugo Sunday 10th September 12 GMT Lat 13.2 Lon 20.0 Pressure 1010 Wind 30 mph. The weekend that Hurricane Hugo was born we watch nervously as Hurricane Gabrielle heads for us for a few worrying days, and then tracks north. A small tropical depression forms but way south and east. Can’t worry about it yet. Just check the weather once a day, then twice a day if it gets closer. Monday 11th September 1800 GMT Lat 12.5 Lon 29.2 Pressure 1003 Wind 40 mph. September is the height of hurricane season, and Safara our 45ft. steel yacht is safely back on her mooring in Maya Cove in the British Virgin Islands. We are back at work on Tortola. The tropical depression has been upgraded to a Tropical Storm called Hugo. Hugo sounds like a nice gentlemanly name, much too nice to bring any unecessary unpleasantness to our idyllic Caribbean islands! Tuesday 12th September 1800 GMT Lat 12.6 Lon 36.7 Pressure 996 Wind 60 mph. One of our children has gone back to school in the UK after a summer of sailing ‘down island’, the other one is doing a gap year and so back with us for a time. We had a slight scare from Hurricane Dean and holed up in Isles Des Saintes between Dominica and Guadeloupe in early August. Had a wonderful calm, cloudless couple of days snorkeling on the reef whilst Dean-watching. But Dean stayed East of us and ran out of steam in the middle of the Atlantic. That’s where we like to see hurricanes blow themselves out! Wednesday 13th September 1800 GMT Lat 12.8 Lon 43.5 Pressure 987 Wind 75 mph. HURRICANE CATEGORY 1 The line between those who live and work on the waters of the Caribbean and those based on land is never more obvious than when bad weather is in the offing. You won’t see landlubbers rushing home after work every evening to listen to the weather forecast and chart the position of every tropical storm in the Atlantic with furrowed brow and pounding heart. The island of Tortola lies at around 18.24 north and longitude 64. 38 west. If the storm continues to travel more west than north then it will inevitably cross 64 west. But the question is will it be north of us, south of us, or the dreadful alternative of neither; in other words, right over the top of us? Thursday 14th September 1800 GMT Lat 13.6 Lon 49.1 Pressure 970 Wind 105 mph. HURRICANE CATEGORY 2 The forecast is that the atmosphere is favourable to Hugo growing into a monster. The storm of the century is forecast to pass south of us into the Caribbean and then turn north towards Puerto Rico or Hispaniola. But what if it starts to make its northerly shift before then? We know that tomorrow morning is D-Day, Decision-Day. Securing boats and property takes hours and hours of heavy manual labour. Judging how much preventative work to secure live and property against the unknowns of intensity and position of an oncoming cyclone, is a constantly changing anxiety. The difference between a Category 2 and a Category 5 is almost immeasurable. With the one everything can be saved if properly secured, with the other, very little can be expected to survive. Friday 15th September 0000 GMT Lat 13.8 Lon 50.5 Pressure 962 Wind 115 mph. HURRICANE CATEGORY 3 We sleep badly. It’s a clear still night, hard to believe there is dreadful churning beast out there hurtling towards us with unimaginable ferocity. Something that can change our lives forever. We get up before dawn and listen to the 6am forecast. For the last 24 hours the system has been moving WNW, just what we did not want. Friday 15th September 1200 GMT Lat 14.2 Lon 53.3 Pressure 940 Wind 145 mph. HURRICANE CATEGORY 4 At work by 7.30. I am an administrator at small private plastic, general and reconstructive surgical clinic. It should be a normal clinic and outpatient day, with patients booked in all morning for post-op checks and consultations and small surgical removals of anything from warts to sutures. We are nervous and tense and rush patients through as fast as possible so that we can close up and start securing the hospital and its grounds. The expats who come in are full of worried energy and anxious. BVIslanders and down- islanders put their trust in a higher authority. “Dis island is blessed. Tortola don’t have no hurricanes. God will protect us,” they tell us. They will not be shutting a single shutter or bolting a single bolt. Are we mad? Do they know something we don’t? Its only later that we discover that God was not protecting anyone from Hugo. Friday afternoon at last and we can secure the place. I clear my desk and my office which has full length and width glass windows facing south east from where Hugo will be entering our island archipelago. Though the first big winds from the dangerous northern sector will arrive from the north east. I can not take a chance on my computer, prints, photocopier, telephone answering machine etc being obliterated by glass flying like bullets and rain travelling with the power of a train. The owner and surgeon Robin Tattersall and I check throughout the buildings and have Jaigopaul the handyman put away anything that might roll or move. We decide to leave battening everything down in the Clinic until Saturday’s weather position makes it inevitable. There is still a chance that the hurricane will slide past south of us. It happened, of course, that Hugo was not to be avoided and Robin and Jag (the handyman– Indian) spent all day Saturday securing the property. They threw all the plastic/metal garden furniture in the swimming pool and boarded up every window in the place. It’s a long, tiring job for them. Robin spent the terrifying night of the hurricane alone in that empty old building full of echoing corridors and pillars while Hugo howled outside looking for vulnerable spaces to burst through. Having gone so far as I thought was sensible at the clinic on Friday, I met husband Stewart and son Orion for a last shop at Riteways supermarket. People were buying the oddest things and there were no candles or matches or batteries to be had anywhere. Some four hours earlier, our neighbour David calls me in a panic, “have you heard – what shall I do?” David is a close friend and neighbour liveaboard in Maya Cove. But currently in between women and so has nobody tonight at home to share the heightened anxiety! I suggest he go straight home and take “Serai” his 38ft. sloop round to the safety of Paraquita Bay – he only draws 5”6” and he should be able to squeeze in. Paraquita is the BVI’s excellent hurricane hole, it’s a large lagoon surrounded by mangroves and only a very tiny entrance. Unfortunately it has quite a shallow bar and at 6’6” we cannot get in on our yacht. Irish Pete, another neighbour, I tell David will have already sailed to Paraquita with a new case of rum and beer on board. Oh yes, and his unwanted tenant, a large rat that had climbed on board just a few days earlier! His creative attempts to get eject that rat are the stuff that legends are built on, specially Irish ones. As we look at Maya Cove on Friday evening, we see an unfamiliar geography to the anchorage. Many of our neighbours have disappeared into hiding places, others have swapped to bigger heavier moorings with more space around them to place anchors. Irish Pete is gone but there is David’s boat Serai lying on his mooring still. So – he didn’t make it into Paraquita, I wonder why? John and Susie Tait had left yacht Gawaine on her mooring in the Cove, but of course they are not liveaboards. Gawaine is just a weekender dinghy really, whilst they actually live in a huge house on the hill overlooking the Cove. Pat and Dorothy, elderly English liveaboards have moved their little yacht “Shamwari”, built from the very trees on their Rhodesian farm, into our tiny mangrove beds here in the Cove. This sheltered area is very small in the north part of the Cove up beyond the West Indies Yacht Charter docks and their boats. They have buried her bow deep in the shallow water where the mangroves grow, with many lines tied to the tree trunks. Friday 15th September 1800 GMT Lat 14.6 Lon 54.6 Pressure 918 Wind 160 mph. HURRICANE CATEGORY 5 That evening I invited David for dinner and we banned the “H” word! During the early afternoon Hurricane Hugo became a dangerous Category 5. It all became very lively when Steve and Helen arrived and stayed till past midnight. They were going to make their decision in the morning as to whether to take Scaup Duck (only draws 4’5”) into Paraquita at first light Saturday morning. I kept looking at the faces grouped around our cockpit and wondering with teeth clenching nervousness, whether it would ever be the same again. Stewart and I barely sleep; we hold hands a lot in the night. At the first crack of light over Ginger Island we wake. Listen to the weather and the knot in my stomach pulls tighter. We discuss the following options: • going across to Hurricane Hole in St John and decided there would be too many big charter boats, badly secured, running amok during the height of the storm. • running down to Culebra, a little island just off Puerto Rico which is meant to be the best hurricane hole in this part of the Caribbean – discarded it – its too far; too many boats. • took the dingy over to the mangroves next to Pat and Dorothy on Shamwari in the far corner of Maya cove, and tested the bottom with a lead line. Too shallow. There was nowhere to go. Our lovely family home in which we had sailed across the Atlantic, Safara, would have to fight for her life right where she was and we have twenty four hours left in which to prepare her. We start work. Four anchors, laid north, north east, south east, south, each heavily weighted with an interesting selection of steel objects that we keep in our bilges. Each anchor is set out as far as possible across the bay and attached to rode (rope) so that no chain enters the boat. Chain snaps under sudden shock loads. Steve and Helen leave the Cove for Paraquita Bay on little Scaup Duck. As they motor past us we wave bravely and wish each other luck with hearty smiles and banter. “Save some of those beers on board for the after-Hugo party!” I yell. Saturday 16th September 1200 GMT Lat 15.4 Lon 58.4 Pressure 940 Wind 140 mph. HURRICANE CATEGORY 4 Around mid day a position fix for Hugo showed more northing and for a little while we dream that Hugo will go north of us and tomorrow we will all be taking up our anchors and laughing at our over-zealousness. But that little fantasy did’nt last through the next position fix on Saturday which put Hugo dead on target for the USVI. Nobby, an ex naval engineer on a 38ft ketch and Ian on Gypsy a 42ft wooden yawl, the only two liveaboards left in the cove put out 2 more anchors each. Susie Tait had called me on Friday morning and said that we must not remain on Safara during the storm. John Tait her husband, (runs the Moorings Charter company, with a fleet of 120 charter yachts to be secured) was a retired naval commander and had been through a few such storms before. He feels very strongly that no one should risk their lives by staying on their boat, and so we were ‘invited’ to stay with them in their strongly built hillside home for the passing of Hugo. |
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| SURVIVING HURRICANE HUGO, PT 2 OF 2 Sept.1989 - A Live-aboard Mariner’s Tale of Hugo by Deb Andrews |
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We think about the Tait’s kind offer as we work. Stewart wants to stay with the boat, but we both know that once the wind rises to above 100 knots there is nothing he can do to help Safara. Rather than be tempted to climb out on dock to tend her lines and fend off boats that have broken their own lines, he would be better away from her.
Of course if the storm goes north or south of us the winds would be lesser and we can all stay with Safara. We defer the decision until another weather forecast. By late afternoon on Saturday we have 11 lines running through our fairleads and down to the bottom of the Cove, each one runs through plastic hose carefully positioned to prevent chafe. We clear the decks, remove all the sails and stow them below decks. We even throw the spare toilet sitting on the stern deck waiting to be fitted, over the side where it will be safe from becoming a missile from battering winds. Easy to retrieve from the bottom only 20ft under us after the storm passes. We setup the running back stays balancing the pull of the inner forestay, and bowse down the halyards as extra support to the mast. Occasionally we look up at the bay road circling the Cove and see pick-up trucks, loaded with wooden boards, roaring smokily along to the East End. Much too little too late, I suspect. If Hugo speeds up we are not ready. I made an apple pie, something to do with all that nervous energy. At this point the storm, encompassing winds of 130-140 knots, is beginning its destruction of Guadeloupe, and our fervent hope is that the high mountains there would slow it down and at least when it hit us, it would be with diminished ferocity. Eerie radio silence from Guadeloupe as though a half million people no longer existed. The hurricane has slowed to 12 knots forward speed. The present course takes the 15 mile wide eye just south of St Croix. The north eastern quadrant of a hurricane is the most dangerous sector. It would give us the highest winds plus the forward speed of 12 knots; the lower quadrants have less forward speed. We would be 38 miles away from the eye at its dosest and must expect NE to SW winds of maximum gusts 140 knots. The winds in the Virgin Islands must expect to pick up before dawn on Sunday. I cook – and call Susie Tait and tell her we will have dinner on Safara and then be up at her place around 10 tonight. We could not be sure that we could leave Safara in our little dinghy first thing on Sunday morning – if the winds reached 30 knots; hence the sudden decision to leave Saturday night. There is nothing more terrifying than not being able to get off your boat when the time has come. Around 10 pm on Saturday night we left Safara and David left Serai. I took our passports and our boat papers, but nothing else. It was a token gesture. We all knew that even if Safara ended up on the road her strong steel hull would be only bruised. It was all the other weaker boats that we thought of. In the moonlight as stumbled into the dinghy we saw tears on David’s face. China our Siamese cat, was very put out as we bundled her into a basket and puttered across the cove. It was a perfect moonlit night, the deserted yachts with their webs of lines leading in to the sea beneath them seemed expectant somehow. Yachts are built to sail, not sit at anchor for months an end. The men hauled the dinghies as high in the mangroves as possible; a 6ft tidal surge in a place that only has a 1ft tidal difference normally is a sobering thought. David goes up the hill to stay with other neighbours and we drove up to the Tait’s. I noticed that the old navy salt Nobby who never leaves his boat in any weather – also left on Saturday evening and went to stay at Harry’s Place on the bayside, a hostelry of doubtful reputation but only at $10 a night. There was no one left in the Cove that night, the deserted homes of all our friends rocked infinitesimally on the calm water. We walk into the Tait’s house like refugees, I holding a cat under one arm and a half eaten apple pie in the other. Stewart carried his tool box and Orion had a bag full of foods for Susie’s cupboards. We are terribly bright and fun guests that night. John tells us exciting stories – of the days when he commanded the British Naval Squadron during the ‘Cod Wars’ around Iceland. He was known by the Daily Telegraph as killer “Tait”. He yarns about days off the coast of Iceland where winds blew at 135 knots and ice grew on the decks like tropical vegetation, and of ramming Icelandic fishing boats. We look at their roof and make silly jokes about it blowing off in a hurricane; we roll up a carpet or two that might be damaged by rain and then go to our respective beds. We could not sleep. I got up at dawn, around 5:30, as did everyone else. Sunday 17th September 0000 GMT Lat 16.1 Lon 60.4 Pressure 941 Wind 140 mph. HURRICANE CATEGORY 4 On Sunday morning there was no wind. The dawn was perfectly, glidingly tranquil. I could see Safara just below us and I couldn’t remember a time when I had not had that knot in my stomach. Since there is no sign of Hugo, Stewart decides to go back to Safara with Orion and they will take down the stanchions and do a few more tasks to secure her. I was nervous not having them with me. We are waiting now….just waiting for the frightening unknown. John left for the Moorings Marina in Roadtown about 6 miles away. The Moorings still had paying guests and as the General Manager his responsibilities were total. But, once the hurricane moves over us the government curfew will kick in and he needs to make sure that he gets back home before the roads are shut down. The hurricane was expected Sunday evening. By the early hours of Monday morning it would all be over. The airport closes, no-one can leave the islands at all. Sea and airports are shutdown. It is strange not seeing the evening lights coming to the airport, most off the BVI planes had gone down to Curacao. Everyone rang me at the Tait’s house, friend after friend. It was like Christmas we wished each other good luck and felt a nervous exhilaration. We who are about to die Caesar, salute you. Friday 15th September 1200 GMT Lat 14.2 Lon 53.3 Pressure 940 Wind 145 mph. HURRICANE CATEGORY 4 What does one gossip to fellow seawives about in the teeth of an oncoming cyclone? Storm recipes? How the kids are? No we compare barometer readings as though our lives depend on them. The first harbinger of Hugo hit Tortola around 9.00 am. It was a furious squall and I watch Safara, and the two distant tiny figures working on her deck still. Susie asked me to help her bring the dog in. Belle is an outdoor dog who never enters the house, we would have to drag her in. But first we have to de-tick her. We sit on the verandah teased by the first of the hurricane winds, picking, huge, fat bloody ticks out of Belle’s coat. The phone rings. Its Stewart, “We’re off the boat”, he said. “I am at Gordon and Nancy’s house. Gordon has to go and board up the shop so I’m here boarding up the house with Nancy. I’ll see you in a little while.” Hugo traverses over Montserrat. Radio Antilles put out a frightening and feeble call and was never heard from again. We hear in horror, and sick with fear the first hand story from a friend listening on ham radio to the professional radio operator still transmitting alone from the top of Saba “please if anyone can hear me, Montserrat is obliterated. We need help, please help us, please call someone”. Then Saba was gone. As though plucked by a dark hand from the surface of the sea. The hurricane is slowing down. His forward speed is now only 9 knots. We hear that two British naval boats, a frigate and RFA Bramble Leaf, are following the hurricane in at a distance of 100 miles. Six hours after Montserrat was hit the British navy were there – someone had heard!!! The first squall dies but the sky is changing. We see the towering hurricane bands striping our usual blue skies. Soon the wind comes hard and steady like an autumn gale. Susie thinks she will take Matthew, her two year old son, for a last play on the verandah. I sort her fridges out because soon the power will go, and we should put everything we don’t actually need immediately in a fridge not-to-be-opened! We collected torches, candles and lamps together. John had, but two lucky weeks previously, fitted very expensive alloy hurricane shutters to the front of his house and these made the inner house very warm. But gave a wonderful sense of security. Stewart and Orion return and as we stand on the verandah looking across towards the South East horizon in the rising wind, mouths dry with fear. The barograph is dropping steadily and the wind is piping up to 50 knots. The sky grows dark in the early afternoon and we have to keep the lights on indoors to see. John is still at the Moorings. Safara is looking good, lying just sheltered from the north easterlies by the shoreline. We think we’ll settle down and watch Crocodile Dundee on the VCR. We have our last showers, for when the power goes out there will be no more water, it will all be out of buckets lifted out of the cisterns below our feet. We just settle down in front of the TV- and the power goes out. The house seems to go quiet and outside the wind prowls and pokes like a wild beast not quite ready to attack. Building up hunger and rage first. Hurricane Hugo keeps to its course just south of St Croix- perhaps at the last minute the high pressure below Florida would push the system further south and we will have a margin of 60 miles instead of 30 from the eye? On the dining room table was a chart of the area with two hourly plots marked in – we endlessly stop before it and discuss all possibilities. Outside it gusts 60 knots and one of the hurricane shutters lifts and begins to bang. “I don’t like that”, said Stewart, “The wind is creating lift, hurricane shutters are built for pressure not for lift.” Sunday 17th September 1200 GMT Lat 16.6 Lon 62.5 Pressure 949 Wind 145 mph. HURRICANE CATEGORY 4 He goes outside and wedges it in place with a large shoring timber braced against the verandah balustrade. He searches for more wood to make bracing timbers for all of the windows. Susi calls John immediately at the Moorings and asks him to come home. He does, and the three men saw up pieces of timber for bracing doors. John decides not to fit them unless it becomes necessary. He tells us a story of commanding an aircraft carrier in a cyclone blowing 150knts. The aircraft housing broke free, and went banging round the vast deck taking a few turrets with it before blowing over the sides. We light candles and try to think about dinner. No-one is very hungry. Susie has a spare Christmas pudding from a new recipe she has been trying out. Do we eat Xmas pudding? Do we? I make the rum butter extra rum! It was like Christmas. We eat sausage casserole by candlelight. With the last of the daylight and the help of full moon we peep out and take a lingering look at Safara. How proud and white she looked in a hurricane lit by moonlight. Full moon – extra high tides. Maybe an 8ft rise in the water we worry? Then the first casualty strikes. To our horror we see Alec and Ginnies boat has broken her mooring lines and is lying across Don’s little Sea Urchin. She is lying to the one extra anchor that had been thrown out, and at the start of the winds this is all she has to prevent her becoming an agent of destruction and sinking three other of our friend’s boats in her path. It was an awful last sight of the pretty little Bay which was home to so many friends and neighbours, and which lives with us all through that night until the dawn on Monday morning brings the final outcome. We listen to the VHF for news and contact with others in the darkness. We tune into St Croix radio and Isle 95 until they are silenced by the oncoming storm in the early evening. Then we switch to St Thomas which disappeared at around 11pm, and finally our local radio ZBVI which clings to the air throughout the night. There is no rain. John says he has never known a cyclone with so little rain. But its still early ..there is plenty to come. Nevertheless here in the house 160 ft above sea level, water begins to creep in under the hurricane shutters and the glass doors on the inside. We collect towels and place them in front of the only door which faces north east. The wind rises to 80 – 90 knots and we try to go to bed around midnight. Every time I shut my eyes I see the boat. I block my ears with cotton wool and roll a pillow over my head, and the dull roaring which reaches brings with it pictures of our home, twisting and turning at the ends of her lines retreating in the face of an implacable enemy. END OF PART 1 |
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Author : Deb Andrews - Editor in Chief - Caribbean property And Lifestyles Magazine
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Keyhole Bay in Roatan
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