Heart Breaking Images

Zebulon, NC

Regular readers of this blog, plus friends and family who visited us in Marathon know how much we love Boot Key Harbor.   Then you can understand how heart breaking it is to see these images after Hurricane Irma.  Deepest sympathy for those who's boats were there.  The only good news, no reports of any injuries or deaths.

We are very fortunate that neither we nor Tarwathie were in the keys on that day.

You can see every mooring here and how many boats remain.  It was reported to be full with more than 300 boats before the storm.  Click on it to zoom in.

The dinghy docks at the marina.  Familiar to our blog readers and visitors. Those motor boats probably came from houses on the other side of the harbor.

Where are the missing boats?  Some in the mangroves.

These missing boats wound up by the bridge.

Whiskey Creek, off Sisters Creek on Boot Key.  These boats went "into the mangroves" to survive.  They all appear to be OK.

Why did so many moorings fail?  A truism about hurricanes is that the biggest danger to boats is other boats.  As one boat breaks loose, it crashes into other boats, breaking them free.  It begins a chain reaction.   You can see in the first picture that the "A" row, closest to the south, and without other rows of boats upwind of them, survived best.  When we rode out hurricane Irene on Tarwathie, we anchored in a bay more than 1/4 mile away from any other boats.