Stormy Weather

It’s been an exciting 36 hours here...

Friday morning was gorgeous here... unfortunately it was the calm before the storm.

Sunrise over Bush Key. Friday was a picture-perfect day here.

Too perfect, actually. Good weather brings other challenges.

2:30 AM Saturday- One of the campers came knocking.
Never a good thing.
As my buddy Pete says, “Good news sleeps ‘til noon.”
When I give the campers their orientation spiel, I always tell them that the Fort is closed from sundown until sunup. Only come inside the place if it is an emergency...
(Running out of ice, water, soft drinks, beer or cigarettes is not considered an emergency...)
“Hey- There are Cubans on the swim beach.” he says.

Lovely.

So, it had begun. 13 refugees, and one well-built chug. At 2:30!
Can’t these guys wait until at least 9 or 10 o’clock?

We rousted the Rangers and gathered Cubans at the dockhouse and while Sarah and Dan started the pre-processing phase, we went to deal with the chug.
We pulled the 15’ Whaler around to the swim beach, got a line on the chug and towed it around to the seaplane beach and pulled it up on the beach a little to keep it from washing away.

The Chug - With an Isuzu desel and a Volvo outdrive.

Sarah and Dan had moved the Cubans into the Fort and had them in one of the vacant quarters and were doing our basic aid package- give ‘em a place to wash the diesel fuel off, a change of clothes if they need it, basic first aid, some food and a place to sit and relax while the Coast Guard is enroute to pick them up.
I checked with them to make sure all was well, then hit the sack- it was about 3:45...
At 6:30 I was back up to check on the chug and to see how things were progressing with the Cubans.
Most of them were sleeping- they had told Sarah they were at sea 36 hours during the trip...

Sarah took 3 of the Cubans down to the beach as a work detail to clean out the chug…
I kept an eye on the 10 others while she had them bag all the refuse, trash, fuel bottles and other crap from the chug.
The Coast Guard cutter “ATTU” arrived at 7:30 to pick up the refugees-
From the “Things that make you go hmmmm” department.-
We had a little surprise after sunrise- the folks over on Loggerhead had another Cuban show up...
Just one guy. Said he was dropped off by a fishing boat...


The weather had started picking up- We had 20 to 25 knot winds and when I checked the weather sites it showed the tropical disturbance down off the Yucatan, heading north-northeast.
Things would be getting bad today and worse tonight and Sunday...
Lovely.

Well… I had 7 campers that night, but they were all scheduled to leave today… I didn’t know if any more were scheduled to arrive, but if there were any on Sunny Days or the Yankee we’d try to dissuade them from staying.
We started making plans on what we needed to do to prepare for the storm that was on its way…
I finished up the last of my morning chores then grabbed a quick bite for breakfast and headed down to the dock. When the ferries arrived they brought bad news: Campers. Quite a few.
And they had been drinking all morning... The captain of the Sunny Days said they had just pulled away from the dock when these guys broke out the Guiness and Corona...One guy was wearing about a pint of Guiness on his shirt. (I thought he'd ralphed on the way out. Turns out it was just spillage.) It was about a dozen young adults- 23-26 year-olds... An even number of guys and their girlfriends/wives... just staying one night.
Half had arrived on with Sunny and half were on the Yankee. I got them all together and gave them the news. We have a tropical storm on the way... "I’m not going to say you can’t stay, but the chances are that with the way the weather is, the boats will probably not be running tomorrow, and it will not be pleasant out here... It will be raining the whole time, very windy and you will be miserable."
The girls were happy about the news... I got the impression that the girls idea of ‘roughing it’ would be no room service at the hotel... The though of a place with no electricity or running water sounded like hell to them. But- they were being good sports about coming on the camping trip. To hear that they wouldn’t be staying was an answer to their prayers.
They guys vacillated a bit on whether to stay or go, but in the end good sense prevailed.
Later I had my turn in the barrel when I was elected to run the bookstore for a few hours. This is a font of hilarious questions and comments from the visitors...
There will be a whole post dedicated to the little slice of heaven that is the Bookstore...

Hunter- My bookstore assistant.

When the ferries left it was raining steadily and we had no campers. We had a half-dozen sailing and motor vessels in the harbor and a number of commercial boats on their way in to take cover from the weather.

By 4:30 in the afternoon we had winds steady in the 40 knot range and gusts to 55...
Textbook tropical storm conditions.
At 6:00 we decided to pull the 25 out of the water… our 25’ patrol boat. It was tied up at the dock, but with winds out of the southeast, the boat would be taking a beating all night.
We got the trailer hooked up and brought the boat around to the beach to yank it out of the water. We’d leave it on the beach, attached to the tractor in case we needed to launch it quickly...


Just after that we had a sailboat in distress... they had gotten tangled with another boat at anchor and had to cut their anchor line. They came to the dock to borrow an anchor... they took some damage sitting at the dock from getting slammed, but they got their new hook and headed out to get set before it got too dark.
A commercial boat was next; he lost his anchor when a shrimper out at the K-bouy dragged across his line... We didn't have any more spare anchors so Chuck gave him permission to tie up to one of the old markers in the North Channel. We wished them gook luck and we headed inside.
We got everything buttoned up for the night and went to sleep listening to the winds howl.

No boats tomorrow... No bathrooms to clean!

Life is good.

Famous- Out.