So how hard is it to take a hurricane named after a redneck seriously? I mean, come on, with all the money we tax payers pump into NOAA, Earl is the best they could come up with? Weak dudes, seriously weak.

Ok, so as I sit here writing this the wind has picked up to a sustained 30 knots and the sky has clouded over. It looks like we're still at least 8 hours away from the start of the really bad weather, so both Amy and I are taking a break and getting ourselves ready for a long night. Amy is currently floating merrily among the bubbles in the bath tub while I just finished playing tag with the weasel clan.

As an aside, for anyone interested, here is how we prepared the boat for the coming storm.

First off, we removed the head sail and then all of the exterior canvas. Next, all the cushions in the cockpit got stacked up and taken off. All of our winch covers, both dinghy engine covers and all 9 of the stay cozies got wrapped up and stuffed in our two cockpit coolers which were then moved below decks.

Because we are tied to the dock at the Buddy Fred's, I put Amy's kayak and my wind surfer in the garage rather than lashing them up on the fore deck. Weused some spare dock lie and wrapped concentric circles around our stack pack and main sail. If we were expecting 100 knot+ winds, I would have removed the main as well, but I know from experience that as long as it's wrapped tight it can handle a good 80 or 90 knots.

Because of our beam, our docking arrangement has us side-tied to a t-head. That means we only have lines on one side of the boat securing us to the dock. To keep us from bashing into the dock pilings over and over, I had Amy lower down our secondary anchor (Delta 35) along with it's 50 feet of chain and roughly 200 feet of 1 inch rode into our dinghy. I then paddled out 300 feet or so away from and in front of our beam and dropped the anchor in 6 feet of water.

I paddled back to the mother ship and together we hauled the anchor in until it set itself fast. I tied a running bowline in the rope rode and then attached two spare dock line to the bowline. These two line were pulled both fore and aft through the deck chocks and then tied tight on the starboard side deck cleats. This anchor serves to hold us off the dock and give us a little forward bite into the direction the storm will blow strongest from.

I imagine we would be fine without this anchor, but I like the idea of minimizing the number of times we pound up against the massive, 18 inch wooden pilings that hold our dock up. Once we had the lines adjusted, we then deployed our chafe gear (split 1 inch water hose) on the contact points between our lines and the boat.

To finish things up, I took duct tape and taped the perimeter of our four, deck house, side hatches in a preventative measure to try and help keep the water out. For what ever reason, I have seen hard driven rain sneak inside these vertical hatches on occasion, so I thought we'd try this and see how it works.

So anyhow, here we are. Our raincoats and safety gear are laid out and ready. Our emergency flashlights are charged and our weasel are stored in their upright seating positions. We even went in to town and got 10 gallons of gas for the generator just in case. Theres not much left to do but sit back and wait to see what comes rolling in and then react to it the best we can.