Hurricane Kay

Our first brush with heavy weather

 I've begun to understand what rain looks like from a distance, and what wind looks like before it hits you. In this bay, we can see the gusts running across the water, and can count down to impact. As we lay in bed the night of the hurricane, our eyes glued to the phone screen readout of the wind sensor, we calibrated our ears to the wind.

We spent two days waiting, checking forecasts, bringing in sails, imagining how we would be tested. As the wind was building, we ran through scenarios together: flooding, mooring breaks free, man overboard, dinghy flips, a neighboring boat breaks free. I felt like there would be some sort of test, and perhaps we could prepare to eliminate the most nasty ones. On the cruiser net, someone made clear to us that if something bad happened, we were On Our Own.

Sometimes, in the days leading up to the storm, it felt like a storm would never come. The sun was out, the winds calm, we even considered going to the pool at the marina. It was strange to be making pancakes and imagine the behemoth of energy hurtling towards us that very moment. Quickly, though, it transformed from a product of my overactive imagination to the type of wind with strong, prying fingers. A zipper not fully closed? A knot poorly tied? The wind would find it.

In the middle of the night, those prying fingers began to lift one of our longboards up. Here came the first test. Around 2am, in 40 knot gusts and the type of rain that stings, we added lashings to the boards, then climbed back into the warm cabin. Everything in the cabin was on a scale from damp to soaking: the rugs, our clothes, the blankets, the floor.

I woke up to the VHF, and the realization that we had slept through three of our hourly anchor watches. "Good morning, cruisers! I hope you all survived the night…" After just a few hours of sleep, we rolled out of bed and scanned the mooring field. Then someone called out on the VHF, "I think a boat is free." JP and I looked at each other. It is strange when a moment that we had prepared for finally arrived. We had decided that one of us should stay on our boat, and one of us would take the dinghy to help the boat that was probably about to run aground with no one aboard. The second test.

JP bailed the dinghy with a big bucket and zipped off to the crime scene. I continued with boat checks every 30 min now that I was awake.

This was what getting a boat was all about: preparing as best we could, then holding ourselves up to the forces of nature to see how we measured up. The fear came in gusts. It felt primal, like we were On Our Own with limited facades of control or comfort between us and a hurricane.

JP and a few other sailors managed to save the boat just seconds before it grounded. In the marina, the dock was ruined and some headsails were ripped in half, but most boats faired alright. When I was first learning to surf, JP said, “Now you’ll never look at a swell the same way again.” After that night, I will never look at a satellite image of a hurricane again.

Source: Zoom Earth

As I write this, Hurricane Roslyn is building off the coast of Pacific Mexico. Even though this is a La Niña year (hurricanes are usually less intense), the Eastern Pacific has had an active hurricane season.

In a small fishing town nearby, a restaurant owner told us she hadn’t had rain in six years. The hillsides were brown, and waiting. In the weeks following the hurricane, the rain that had stung our faces and snuck through our hatches was now making the cactuses swell. I didn’t even know Baja had such beautiful flowers.