Boating; Trop-storm Keith memories!
An old friend sent me a comment on this blog; "Do you remember when we took my motor sailor up the river during Trop-storm Keith?"
As I recalled it was 1989 but I now realize through a computer search that it was mid-November 1988. I was living at Boardwalk Caper near Ft. Myers Beach and had a Yacht Watch service. Bill W was a client and he was convinced that Keith was coming right at us. He was darned near right.
He convinced me to help him move his "Gypsy Moth" up the river two days before the storm made landfall on the Boardwalk Caper canal. He had it all planned out. There was an oxbow just north of Marina 31 that offered good shelter and strong mangroves.
The first step was leaving my pick-up truck and his inflatable dinghy about twenty miles upriver in the marina parking lot. We drove his car back home and started across the bay towards the mouth of the Caloosahatchee river. He dropped me at the marina and I followed him to his oxbow.
It was near nightfall by the time we finished the tie up. He would ride out the storm and I would go home to tend to the other boats I 'watched'. Happily, Keith barely missed us but we got storm surge and a lot of float-offs but everyone came through okay. It was a very hard night. I went through two, five hundred foot spools of half inch three strand before that November dawn.
Didn't get paid for half of it. Keith pretty much ended 'Yacht Watch' because of the minimal damage it caused. We went back to Yacht Maintenance and weren't sorry but we missed the extra income.
We were a good maintenance company that disliked saving yacht babysitters who didn't do there job and then panicked when their owners were coming to town. Got stiffed by one because the owners didn't think he was doing his job. He wasn't and 36 hours of intense labor doesn't hide 9 months of neglect, IE polishing a turd.
As I recalled it was 1989 but I now realize through a computer search that it was mid-November 1988. I was living at Boardwalk Caper near Ft. Myers Beach and had a Yacht Watch service. Bill W was a client and he was convinced that Keith was coming right at us. He was darned near right.
He convinced me to help him move his "Gypsy Moth" up the river two days before the storm made landfall on the Boardwalk Caper canal. He had it all planned out. There was an oxbow just north of Marina 31 that offered good shelter and strong mangroves.
The first step was leaving my pick-up truck and his inflatable dinghy about twenty miles upriver in the marina parking lot. We drove his car back home and started across the bay towards the mouth of the Caloosahatchee river. He dropped me at the marina and I followed him to his oxbow.It was near nightfall by the time we finished the tie up. He would ride out the storm and I would go home to tend to the other boats I 'watched'. Happily, Keith barely missed us but we got storm surge and a lot of float-offs but everyone came through okay. It was a very hard night. I went through two, five hundred foot spools of half inch three strand before that November dawn.
Didn't get paid for half of it. Keith pretty much ended 'Yacht Watch' because of the minimal damage it caused. We went back to Yacht Maintenance and weren't sorry but we missed the extra income.
We were a good maintenance company that disliked saving yacht babysitters who didn't do there job and then panicked when their owners were coming to town. Got stiffed by one because the owners didn't think he was doing his job. He wasn't and 36 hours of intense labor doesn't hide 9 months of neglect, IE polishing a turd.
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