Hurricane Ivan’s aftermath: The cost of a Caribbean storm

In the face of Hurricane Ivan, we learned that having proper insurance is the absolute difference between losing your boat and sailing away stronger than ever

The call came through from my wife while I was packing up and getting ready to leave my Dublin hotel room after breakfast for a client meeting. She was in our London home. ‘Have you seen the weather in the Caribbean?

Turn on your TV!’ I switched on the BBC news, and a weather map showed the symbol of a rotating hurricane where it just shouldn’t be, hugging the equator at $10^{\circ}$ North, and heading for Grenada – where our Dufour 41 Alexa was laid up in Spice Island Marine Services. The weatherman suggested that the hurricane – named Ivan and category 4 heading to 5 – would probably veer northwest as it approached the eastern Caribbean, but I felt very worried.

The yard in Grenada

It was early September. Four months earlier, having completed the ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) and cruised the southern Caribbean, we had decided to lay Alexa up for the hurricane season in Grenada. We had thought of Trinidad, 90 miles to the south, but Grenada was considered outside the hurricane belt and was acceptable to insurance companies for hurricane lay-up.

A lovely place to be, and good flight connections back to the UK. So, one sunny morning we chugged through the crowded anchoring of Prickly Bay to the travel hoist and had her hauled. The travel hoist plonked her down by the fence and she was propped up by seven side stands, in the rather flimsy Caribbean way.

At the office, I asked Susie – the somewhat intimidating office manager – how often they had hurricanes. She said, ‘Every 50 years and the last one was 49 years ago.’ I laughed and asked, ‘What action do you take if one happens?’

‘Well, the boats get laid down.’ I said, ‘Really, you put the boats on their sides?’ And she said, ‘No, the wind lays ’em quite flat!’

She wasn’t laughing. Waiting for the cab to the airport, I took one last look at Alexa. I thought what a great underwater profile she had and how she had carried us safely the 6,000 miles from Chichester Harbour.

Hurricane Ivan hits

Four months later, the eye of Hurricane Ivan passed right through Spice Island Marine at 0200 on 7 September, 2004. According to an eyewitness, in about 80 mph winds the boats were vibrating noisily in the gusts but were all upright. Then a 100mph-plus gust shrieked through and all 300 of them fell at the same instant.

In the days before the hurricane struck many cruisers anchoring out in Prickly Bay had begged the yard to lay them up. They took about 20 of them in but ran out of props – they were taking props from the existing laid- up boats. So many had just four props, and this didn’t help. The aftermath of Ivan on Grenada has been well chronicled, with 39 people killed and 18,000 left homeless. As for Spice Island Marine, half of the 800 yachts were significantly damaged.

Of those at anchor, 15 sank and 50 were washed up on the beaches. What wasn’t as well documented was the interaction between yachties and the local population.

The aftermath

Five days after the hurricane I still hadn’t had any news from the yard – just a recorded message – but we assumed we had lost Alexa. Then I received a call from a cruising friend – Laura, an American single-hander. Her boat had sunk in Prickly Bay, but she was calling me on her salvaged satphone.

She was desperate – she said that she hadn’t eaten for four days and hadn’t had water for a day as all supplies were only being sold to locals. She told me she was standing by Alexa and sent me a photo. I told her where the companionway keys were hidden and how she could access bottled water and canned food on the boat.

At Clarkes court marina up the coast, armed American cruisers formed a defensive perimeter to stop local people looting boats for supplies – especially their sails which were wanted as tarpaulins for roofs. (Later, many of us gave our sails to local charities for this purpose). Overall, the relationship between the local ‘have-nots’ and the foreign – and white – ‘have-yachts’ completely broke down.

Clearly, many islanders were desperate, while it was a very scary time for cruising yachties who survived or were guarding their boats. In the aftermath, owners of boats wrecked in the yard were amazed to get monthly storage invoices from Spice Island Marine. Susie emailed us all, saying: ‘They are still here – we haven’t tossed them back into the ocean!’

Let’s say that relations between the yard and owners were strained and took a while to recover. The situation was made worse by the yard’s decision to employ a salvage company out of Trinidad to raise all the felled boats. This was necessary since it was impossible to move anything in the yard until the ‘boat soup’ had been cleared.

But they did this very quickly and brutally, using cherry pickers, and many boats that had sustained minor damage despite falling, were very badly damaged by the lift. Two months passed and back in London my wife and I assumed we had lost our boat and were discussing how this could be handled by our insurers, Navigators & General.

We had put so much into our lovely boat we were really depressed. On the other hand, we had a house with a roof.

Help arrives

However, one morning I received an extraordinary phone call. On a rather crackly line someone announced himself as Mark Goodacre of Goodacres, the yacht recovery company based in Portsmouth. ‘We’ve been appointed by Navigators & General to assess and then either write off or fix boats covered by them in Spice Island Marine.

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I am standing on Alexa right now and we can fix her up very well. We have already ordered a new rig from Dufour and it’s on a ship to Martinique, as we speak!’ Wow! We were amazed. Euphoric, actually! Apparently, as we found out later, the real trick to getting a boat recovered was to get the mast order in quickly.

Some owners were waiting for a mast a year later. Nav & Gen had authorised Goodacres to order the mast – in fact they paid for it there and then to encourage dispatch. Goodacres lined up eight boats in a corner of the yard that had been classified as ‘repairable in situ’. Expensive boats like Oysters, Malos and Hallberg-Rassys were put on ships to be repaired by their manufacturers in Europe.

Quite a few were written off and chainsawed for landfill. Goodacres set up their own workshops, for GPR, joinery, stainless steel and so on. Three cheers for Nav & Gen!

After Christmas I decided to go out and see how the work was progressing. I was told the boat was habitable and the showers in the yard were now working, so I decided not to book a hotel. When I arrived at the yard, Barry Goodacre (the boss) showed me around the boat and explained what they had done. There was a brand-new rig.

All the toe rails and pushpit/pulpit had been replaced, about five hull piercings had been repaired, as had most of the cracked interior joinery. Because so much water had collected in the boat, the sterndrive plate had rusted out, and they had replaced that.

Amazing skills

A local boat guardianage company, Island Dreams, had been commissioned by Nav & Gen to do the interior clean-up. When Alexa fell, the hatches had popped out and she filled up with about 18 inches of muddy rainwater.

There was a tide line! But they had scrubbed everything – all the upholstery had been cleaned and even the ensign and courtesy flags had been laundered, ironed and left on the chart table! I watched a carpenter – Mike from Emsworth – replacing a capping round the aft cabin door.

‘Hmm, that’s close grain blonde mahogany of about $15^{\circ}$ radius. I have something very similar in my wood pieces box – yes, it fits pretty well… just chamfer the edge a bit, there you go!’

I was astonished; you couldn’t see the join! His skill just blew me away. One day I asked Barry what the hardest job was. He said a very large hole in the topsides where the boat had fallen on a concrete block. I asked where.

He replied: ‘On the starboard rear quarter – if you can find the repair, I will buy you dinner. If you can’t, you buy me dinner!’ Needless to say, a few months later my wife and I bought Barry a very expensive dinner at the Red Crab restaurant.

Other stories

Other owners were doing a lot of the work themselves. Lu and Rod Heikell’s (YM columnists and pilot book writers) Cheoy Lee 36, Seven Tenths, was close to Alexa and they had become chums as we met up in London to commiserate. One day Lu was re-wiring the mast electrics, where the contractors hired to raise the boats had cut through the remains of the mast with a chainsaw!

Lu had been re-connecting the radar coaxial. I remember chatting to a local chap, Sheldon, who worked for the Raymarine agent there, and Lu had earlier asked him some technical questions. He commented to me, ‘Hey mon – she is beautiful and also knows her way round a circuit board – what a woman!

She is sent here from heaven!’ On the last day of my 10-day visit, Barry and his team were discussing a Colvic 40 that was propped up next to Alexa. I could hear Barry saying, ‘That hull crack probably extends into the engine area – it’s a horrible old boat; I think we’ll write her off.’

Now, Julaine was owned by Kevin, who had done the ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) with us. It was a very under-insured boat! I phoned Kevin back in Blighty and he was desperate not to lose his boat. So, I begged the Goodacre team to scrape the antifouling off, to have a good look, in the hope the crack didn’t extend to the engine bay. They agreed to do this.

The crack stopped two inches from where they had put the ‘condemn it’ marker. Pheww! Kevin owed me.

Celebratory beers

This was three months after the hurricane, and the yard was divided between a huge pile of written-off boats and 100 or so boats on which work was being done at varying levels of competence. Some unscrupulous people had bought wrecks off the insurers and were patching them up to be sold.

One boat had a hole you could drive a car through, and they were glassing in little stringers and huge fibreglass patches – how could anyone go to sea in one of those death traps? Just before I flew out, the local sailmaker – turbulence sails – had got the new mast and boom up and was rigging the boat with shrouds that were heavier duty than the originals, and Dyneema running rigging and a Profurl to replace the inferior Facnor furler.

Everything they did was an upgrade. Turbulence had found my spinnaker pole and put it back on the boat but hadn’t located the whisker pole. For an hour I poked around a huge tangled pile of broken spars in a corner of the yard, and there it was – in perfect condition. I let out a whoop of triumph and ambled over to de big fish café for a celebratory ice-cold Carib beer.

Us boat salvagers had a lot of cold beers there. Mercifully, the bar re-opened a month before even the showers and facilities were fixed. Nothing like working in a dusty tropical boatyard to give you a raging thirst.

Happy ending

Three months later Marj and I returned to Grenada on the day of Alexa’s re-launch. She was a stronger and better boat. Nav & Gen would insist that we move her to Trinidad for the next hurricane season. Grenada had returned to its cheerfulness and life went on, but it had been a very ugly period and underlined to us that the amiability between two groups of very differing material wealth is paper-thin and can be tested to the limit when the chips are down.

Our own experience of the consequences of Hurricane Ivan had been ameliorated by the excellence of our insurers – Nav & Gen – and by the involvement of Goodacres. But other yachties had less indulgent insurers and different outcomes, (the word ‘betterment’ developed a nasty ring to it) and many islanders (and cruising liveaboards) lost their homes and even their lives.

Hurricanes remain the curse of the best cruising grounds in the world. And they are getting worse and more frequent.

Postscript: Alexa’s repairs had cost Nav & Gen about £75K. Just the cost of the mast and boom was about £25K. Six months later I awaited the renewal quote with some anxiety. No change on the previous year’s one. Amazing!

Lessons learned

Don’t be tempted to do hurricane season lay-up north of Trinidad or south of Chesapeake Bay! It may be cheaper and more convenient, but…

Use a cradle – If you have to, make sure the boat is stored in a cradle, with tie-downs and maybe the keel types in a trench. And get the mast off!

Proper insurance – Make sure you go with an effective insurer. And one that has a good relationship with a yacht recovery company. This article gives a clue.

Check the work – If your yacht is wrecked and it is being recovered, pay visits and check the work is being done to an acceptable standard. Maybe instruct a reputable local surveyor to do a thorough inspection before accepting sign-off on the project, even if your insurer is happy to.

Get guardianage – Employ the services of a reliable guardianage/yacht management company. Even if your boat isn’t wrecked, they can prep and launch the boat for your arrival, find the best local yacht service and engineering companies, and individual painters and scrapers, and can smooth over the many bureaucratic hurdles. Ask other local yachties for personal recommendations.

Prioritise the rig – Finally, if it all goes pear-shaped, get your insurer to order and pay for the new rig right from the get-go, otherwise you may be looking at a year to get sailing again.

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