Anchored for a Storm, August 2020

Hobbes would have described the weather event as nasty, brutish, and short. It hammered Connecticut on August 27th from the northwest through Bethany, North Haven, Hamden, and then, big-time, Branford. The town had 99 percent of its power knocked out, with lines down everywhere and hundreds of trees sheared off, uprooted, or otherwise mangled.

We were anchored in good mud, upwind of a marsh, in four feet of water, with the oversized ground tackle we've lugged around on Pup for 17 years so that we can sleep at night. As a last-minute thought I led the rode from the bow roller to the big midships cleat that's bolted through the cockpit coaming. This provided a little extra stretch and helped with the shock-loading. I'm not sure the bow cleat would have held. NOAA reported multiple microbursts with windspeeds in our zone at 90-100 mph, or 80+ knots. Melissa's video below is three clips from the first couple of minutes when it hit. Then it got really windy for a little while and she stopped filming so she could hold on with both hands.

In those few minutes we were busy, running in gear and trying to stay behind the anchor rode to take some strain off it. We had our PFDs close at hand, and possibly should have put them on. But I've never liked the idea of being trapped under a boat with an inflated PFD, and thought, well, we can always walk ashore...

A word about NOAA, an agency that does a lot of good work with not enough money and, it must be said, under extra pressure these days from some dubious non-scientific outsiders: Their 24-hour weather predictions for this storm had been very good, along the lines of "There's a strong potential for nasty weather to develop by tomorrow afternoon. Keep an eye out for it." That was enough to make us cancel our cruising plans and stick close to home. And the warnings did increase in urgency the next day, but what had been expected to be some severe thunderstorms coalesced very quickly into something much more powerful, and the system moved so fast that NOAA's marine emergency alerts began to arrive less than half an hour before the weather did. Even then, we could clearly see what was approaching us on radar from a smartphone app while listening to NOAA weather warnings over the marine VHF that focused on danger in White Plains, New York, over 50 miles west of us.

We didn't have time to run far, but we were only a few minutes from where we wanted to be in case of really bad weather — in the shallows, with sticky mud to anchor in, room for plenty of scope, protection from waves and flying debris, and a soft place to leeward if we had to scud or wade.

There's a good discussion of the whole event by Ryan Hanrahan of NBC Connecticut.

- DL

 

 

Comments

[Paul Cronin]

Wow, Doug, glad you had a great protected location with big tackle down. Nice Pup kept you dry and you have great seamanship skills to know it is coming and find the right location.

Mother Nature is pissed off and letting us know.

I was not as lucky between Cape Ann and Gloucester on the Aug 23, I got wacked hard, made it but one I will not forget. Took footage but not as long as Melissa was able to get.

[Ty]

Great footage. Quick Q—how were you able to deploy the black bandana so quickly? Asking for Ty Streeter.