Hu

Hurricane Hole, Key Biscayne
N 25 41 13 W 80 10 25

This morning we left No Name Harbor to move over to Hurricane Hole nearby. We decided not to sail north because the forecast said basically no wind and thunderstorms. Same for tomorrow, but enough wind to sail Friday night and Saturday.

The contrast in scenery between No Name Harbor and Hurricane Hole is drastic. No Name is part of a state park, so it is surrounded by mangroves and hiking paths. Hurricane Hole is private and it is completely rimmed by expensive lavish modernistic houses of the newly rich. The houses look very much like those one sees in TV programs like Miami Vice and CSI Miami. On TV, they are always owned by drug lords or other despicable people. I don't remember any TV or Hollywood treatment that depicted
such people as sympathetic. In any case, there is no place here to dinghy ashore so we won't get any close inspections.

Around noon, the forecasted thunderstorm passed. What a storm it was. The wind whipped up to about 50 knots in just a few seconds, and the rain fell torrentially. I was looking out through the companionway door and I could hardly see the shore line 100 feet away. Anyhow, the anchor held firmly and the storm died down to a more sedate 25 knots within 5 minutes.

Did we escape unscathed? No. We have a canvas fly that extends from the boom gallows to the backstay. It provides an extra measure of shade from the sun. During the intial gusts before Tarwathie could swing into the wind, I saw the fly begin to blow sideways out of it's mount. I dashed out into the wind and rain to grab it but I wasn't fast enough. It went overboard. I watched it floating in the water behind us and thought about the dinghy. Nope. It would be foolish to try to lower the dinghy
into the water in a 50 knot gale, not to mention the foolishness of tooling around the harbor in the dinghy in such conditions. The fly drifted away toward shore. After the storm, we went searching for it with the dinghy, to no avail. It must have sunk.

This afternoon, Libby had and idea and we rigged a beach towel to replace the missing fly. It is not on securely, but it is not bad. It might hold us until we can buy a piece of Sunbrella fabric to sew a real replacement. When I replace it, I'll also secure it with cotter pins through the ends of the track so that we don't repeat the mistake.