Our date with Irene

Like every other boater on the east coast, we'd been watching hurricane Irene for almost a week.  Soon, it was apparent that it this large storm was going to waddle slowly up the coast from North Carolina and finally get to us. As it turned out, that's what happened just in time for the weekend.

Knowing what was in store, we went down to Norwich, CT where we keep the boat on Saturday morning and met virtually everyone on our dock, each of whom was adding lines, tying down their inflatables and checking their canvass. We had to remove our bridge enclosure, which would have given us way too much sail area for the expected 75 mph winds. The boat looked strange without it.

Late Saturday afternoon, virtually everyone had left and that left us. Our plan was to stay on the boat during the hurricane and that's what we did. But, with everything ship-shape late Saturday, we decided to walk the docks and see the many boats that had arrived at our marina to escape the storm. We're 13 miles up river  from Long Island Sound and the marina offers good storm protection.

Frances brought a camera and decided that we should shoot many of the boat names and post them here on our blog.  Here's her selection:

 Don't know what this boat was but it looked like an old Trumpy. It was about 70 feet long.

 "Freedom" was Bill's favorite.  A really beautiful lobster-yacht with teak covering boards and swim platform. And yes, that's the way teak is supposed to look.

 This has to be the best boat name of the weekend.  We have to assume that the owner has some connection to the place where America gets its coffee in the morning.  Even the typeface is perfect.

 We loved the name, "Mean Doreen."  It appeared to be a charter boat, and a really nice one.

We have no idea what this means or where the hailing port is.

We also had several really big boats.  Here are two of them, tied up to our former gas dock. The boat in the foreground also had an anchor out. The really big boat the background had two anchors out.  Guess that why those captains get the big bucks.

"Thirteen," the bigger of the two boats, also had a tender, tied up at a separate dock.  Nice tender, don't you think?

 We went to sleep on Saturday night with no wind or rain.  Pooka, our boat cat, helped Bill read himself to sleep.

We awoke on Sunday morning early with the sound of the boat hitting the piling on our starboard side. We had expected the storm to hit from the west but it was from the east instead, so we got up and ventured out into the howling wind and rain. Luckily, the owner of another Silverton who was visiting to escape the hurricane, gave us a hand and we adjusted to lines.

At that point, we had cable and electric service and we watched the TV coverage of Irene's progress until, first the cable service failed, and then the marina shut down the electric.  Not to be stopped for one minute, Frances broke out the butane stove and cooked a great breakfast. We switched on a computer running on batteries and continued to follow the path of the storm. We even sent a email to our dockmates telling them that while the wind was blowing like hell, all the boats were safe.

The rest of Connecticut wasn't so lucky.  Irene downed trees that took out the power to more than 100,000 homes.  Sometimes, it's better to be on a boat.

Eventually, the wind and rising tide subsided and we left the boat for a quick trip home.  All in all, it was an interesting experience.  Nothing broken or damaged on the old boat but we did  end up with something that we can look back on in future years.

Speaking of looking back, we took a picture of a nearby piling and if you look closely, you can see how far up the water actually came, even here in eastern Connecticut where the storm was far from its worst.