Hurricane Saviors and the Kindness of Strangers

Here’s the sad news: In the future—two weeks, two years, two decades from now—a major hurricane will strike the Caribbean, and it will splatter hundreds or thousands of boats against the shore. Some of these boats will be destroyed, some boats driven ashore will be barely scratched—and most will be somewhere in between. 

For wealthy yacht owners with clean fingernails and pristine, well-insured vessels—well, you can stop reading right now. This article isn’t for you. 

This article is intended for the liveaboard with a modest vessel and (suddenly, unexpectedly) empty pockets. You’ve not only lost your yacht, you’ve lost your home and your immediate future. And you’re far from family and their resources. Naturally, to put it mildly, you’re bummed. 

Cry. 

I’m serious. 

I cried a number of times after Hurricane Hugo—once in public with Jody Culbert of the trimaran Foxfire, too distraught to even realize the pathetic idiot loudly crying was me!?!

You’re gonna be full of emotion—anger, tension, frustration, and regret at the injustice of it all—and a river of tears will help wash all your anguish away. 

Done?

Fine. Now get your God-damn butt in gear, sailor! Vessels don’t rescue themselves—nor egos or lifestyles. It takes work, hard work. There’s only one way out—hard, complicated, difficult, dangerous, frustrating work. 

The Lord helps those who help themselves, ditto your neighbor on the boat next to you. 

Yes, you’ve lost everything, but you can get it back with a little help from your friends. 

The way you attract help from others is in two distinct, time-proven ways—you help others, and you allow others to help you. To ‘always do for others and let others do for you,’ in Bob Dylan’s words. 

That’s right—you demonstrate your worthiness of being offered a helping hand—by offering your own hand in service to another. 

This is key. 

Nobody wants to help a lazy man in his Lazy Boy recliner. Yet almost every cruising sailor is willing to help a fellow mariner who gets off his fat ass and puts his weary shoulder to the Wheel of Life.  

Once upon a time after a hurricane on St. John, there was a beach with five boats on it in National Park waters. Four of those boats were gotten off by a volunteer group of Corinthian sailors from the marine community—totally without charge. The fifth was owned by a guy who watched but didn’t volunteer to help the others—and even refused to share his precious gear in the salvage of the other vessels. Worse, he kept asking the hardworking volunteers around him (hourly), when they’d be able to get to his vessel, The final answer ended up to be—never. 

His vessel was eventually removed in pieces by a clam-bucket on a crane paid for by FEMA.

Don’t be that guy. 

The idea isn’t to ask for help, it’s to work so hard at such an immense challenge that people of good conscience can’t help but to assist you in your desperate, noble quest.

Hurricanes and natural disasters bring out the best and worst in people. The rescuer friends I made during Hurricane Hugo in 1989 are still my dear friends nearly four decades later. Every. Single. One!

Here’s what you are going to need: an army of willing, loving people, numerous boats both large and small, hundreds (thousands) of feet of tow lines, numerous anchors, sheets of plywood, 4x4s, long levers, small automobile jacks, a couple of come-alongs, a massive amount of random cordage, and a sense of humor. 

Oh, and don’t forget food, sun-block, beer, rum, ganja, and drinking water. 

The boat-to-be-rescued has to be able to float and have water all the way around it—hopefully on sand or earth, not jagged rocks. 

It doesn’t have to be much water—but this ‘pirate free-style’ method of salvaging yachts at zero expense requires a buoyant (non-holed, watertight) vessel with water all around the hull—even if that water is only an inch deep. 

Passersby, attracted by your working and your wreck, will ask if they can help. People are basically good, especially after a storm. 

Immediately thank them and put them to work clearing any rocks (or, if unable to remove them, to mark them) on the shortest path between your beached vessel and deep water. 

You can do this. It’s been done before, will be done again, and you and your homeboys can do this, now, when it really matters to you. The actual rescue has to happen at high tide, This means that everyone involved should gather a minimum of three hours earlier. (Some should gather about a good five hours before—there’ll be plenty to do.)

Now, all this gear and so many skilled people willing to get muddy might seem impossible to gather together, but this will actually happen organically in places like St. John. Local sailors will spontaneously gather together to help a friend. And then, since they have all the gear and are high-as-a-kite on the good vibes, they’ll get a couple of other boats off as well. 

…rinse & repeat!

Think of an old-fashioned ‘barn-raising’ only the community is reincarnating cruising vessels and sailors back to their natural habitat, Mother Ocean. 

Okay, the Big Day arrives! The boat is watertight, has functioning bilge pumps, and there’s a rock-free path to deep water. (For low rocks difficult to remove, a sheet of plywood can be placed over them—not ideal but better than giving up.)

The first thing to do is set out three-to-ten large, well-dug-in (borrowed) anchors with generous scope. Run the anchor rodes back to the boat on the beach and use the aground sailboat’s own winches to tension these lines. (Also, of course, the anchor windlass.)

This takes a lot of time—start with a dozen people at least three hours before high tide. 

Next, strongly attach three anchor rodes to the stricken vessel—and lead them out to sea to be passed to the three (or more) volunteer powerboats waiting at anchor. 

On the heaviest boat I’ve (with forty others) ever gotten off, we draped three anchor rodes around the entire hull, held on by light lines from stanchion bases. Don’t underestimate how strong this has to be—it must withstand over ten thousand pounds of line pull (and shock loading). 

Next, allow the main halyard of the beached sailboat to hang straight down from the mast head, and end a foot above the sand. 

Next, get the fleet of dinghies ready. 

Somebody with a loud voice, a bit of common sense, and a pleasant but firm manner has to be in charge to call the shots, and someone with construction experience should also be independently overseeing project safety. (Just ask schoolteacher John Ritter, who lost an ear in Coral Bay when a cleat pulled out of a beached trimaran’s deck.) 

Let’s zero in on each of these major elements for a moment. The tow boats—three or more of them—present a unique challenge. Pulling is just part of the job. But if they just pull, their prop walk will walk them sideways into each other or their rodes, possibly resulting in damage. 

Thus, they have to be pre-anchored in place in a straight line from towboat anchor, tended towboat, and beached vessel. And the towboats need to be staggered—say, the first towboat 100 feet away, the second 150, the third 200 feet, etc. 

Why do I say ‘tended?’ Because the windless and forward anchor rode must be carefully adjusted once the towboats give full power. There will be a lot of slack in the forward anchor line which might foul the towboat’s prop. Thus, its slack must continuously be taken-in and eased, depending. 

Handheld VHF’s are a perfect way for Command Central and the towboats to communicate. But flags and whistle signals can work to say tension, half power, full power, full-stop, etc, the towlines. 

Now let’s look at the anchors used to kedge the boat back into deep water. These can’t drag in mid-relaunch, as resetting them takes considerable time. And, don’t forget that Nylon stretches over 20% under load. These kedge lines must be tightened again and again until bow-tight. Realize that, once tightened, they are as dangerous as a loaded gun. (Just ask the little girl at Yacht Haven on Phuket who was instantly killed by a mega-yacht’s dock line that parted.)

All this has to be as well thought out as possible in advance—because ‘high tide’ (or hang tide) is effectively only an hour or so. 

This isn’t a huge window if all your anchors drag and all your towboats entangle each other’s tow lines. 

Here’s what happens: With the anchor rodes bow-tight and the towboats tugging with nearly full power and the crowd of about ten drunk, fat people surging on the halyard (to rock the vessel however slightly); the fleet of dinghies are sent in just barely on a plane, with throttle set for max wake. These dinghies form a circle and repeatedly give as large a wake as possible to the beached vessel, which is now under tremendous pressure for the multi-anchors, multi-towboats and multi-mast-yankers. 

Nothing will happen—well, that’s what it will seem like. 

Take a break—the towboats will only want or be able to pull hard for a few minutes at a time. 

One thing will have happened, with the circus master realizing it, however. The anchor rodes will be slack! Tighten. Tighten more. Tighten until you’re worried/sure they will snap with the immense pressure. 

Repeat the whole mess again, and again and again… and within a couple or ten attempts, the vessel will noticeably move. 

Here’s the extremely good news—if the vessel moves a quarter of an inch, you’ve won! Suction with the bottom will have been broken, and, with a little more time and effort, the vessel will be back into deep water. 

This will work on any modern yacht. I’ve done it more than ten times—and never failed once. Even more amazing, my St. John Crew got the heaviest wooden boat imageable off (Richard West’s High Country) exactly in this way… an extremely heavy boat in the 40,000+ pound range. And it was only in inches of water—not feet. 

Is this dangerous? You betcha! Moving 20-ton objects always is. A loaded rope is like a cannon which may or may not fire at any moment. But it works. 

And, yes, it takes a village—but a village will always be there if you are willing to be there for that village. 

After one hurricane on St. John, a bunch of us local sea gypsies and ‘bahn heer’ West Indians banded together and relaunched a dozen or so boats within the first week or two.

I’ll never forget one Hungarian singlehander crying tears of joy as his 42-footer appeared to suddenly ‘jump’ back into the water. 

Yes, hurricanes bring out the best in people. Take St. Johnian yacht racer Ernest Matthias, who often generously donates his time to the marine community after major storms. He says in his lovely, lilting Calypso cadences, “…hurricanes, dey blow all de skin one color, mon!”

How true. 

Take Eliot Hooper of the 100-foot, 100-year-old, three-masted schooner Silver Cloud as another example. After every hurricane, he has towed stricken vessels off for free. He’s done it dozens of times. This puts his vessel and his crew at risk. It costs him money and time. And the potential liability is so immense: well, don’t even THINK about it!

Once, when Sint Maarten was hit extremely hard by Hurricane Luis, he brought tons of relief supplies to that stricken island at the height of hurricane season. Another storm threatened. He fled back to St. John, but not quite in time to properly prepare his storm tackle. He did the best he could. He fought the good fight. But Silver Cloud itself was driven ashore. 

The very next day, Elliot and his boys started digging Silver Cloud back out into deep water. It was difficult. He had to sort of build a railway car underneath her and roll her off sideways. 

…but he did it. 

With a little help from his friends. 

…over the course of four long hard years!

Hey, who said it was going to be easy?

Interestingly, many insured vessels have had to wait for months to be surveyed by their insurance company so it could figure out if it was financially-advisable to salvage—by which time all the vessels awash were totally-destroyed by ferry boat wakes and ensuing storms.

Here’s the best advice I can give you—don’t allow your vessel to be wrecked in a Caribbean hurricane. But if it is, help the sailor next to you because, without his/her help and your help combined, you’re both doomed. 

Fatty and Carolyn are still eating gourmet $4 meals in hurricane-free Singapore.

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