Usually we post on Thursdays and Sundays. We thought we would put a post up today since we are…waiting. Waiting for Idalia.

That’s Hurricane Idalia, for those not living in a floating box in the Southeast US. She’s scheduled to make landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida in a couple of hours and then track northeast across Georgia and South Carolina. Sooooo, we’re anticipating some weather.

Hurricane preparation is a standard part of cruising life, though this is our first experience with it. Although one always hopes not to encounter a hurricane, most people who cruise full time have experiences with them. The goal is to protect our lives and our boat-in that order. Fortunately, we are in a great location to weather this storm. Brunswick is a famous “hurricane hole”, meaning it’s sheltered and is a place where a lot of people go to ride out storms. For the last two days, we’ve been preparing Meraviglia for the storm. That generally means securing her as much as possible and reducing her “windage”. Windage is the “stuff” that can catch the wind. Fortunately, we have not yet rigged her sails, so we didn’t need to remove those. But we did take down the bimini, the canvas covering over the cockpit. We also removed the gas grill that was on the stern rail. We then made fast anything that might blow away. We moved the anchors to the cockpit and tied down the whisker pole to the deck. We made sure all the fenders were properly inflated (think big balloons that cushion the boat from the dock and added some extras.

Here you can see the extra fenders and dock lines. Also, the bimini has been removed and anything loose has been removed from the deck.

Our biggest concern is the rig: the mast and boom. We are in the middle of replacing her chainplates. Chainplates are the pieces that attach the stays and shrouds to the hull of the boat-they basically hold the mast up. We are currently missing the forestay and the two cap shroud chainplates. The forestay runs from the masthead to the bow of the boat. The cap shrouds run from the mast head to either side. This leaves us with the backstay, the staysail stay, and two lower shrouds on each side. The problem with the staysail stay and the lowers is they don’t run to the top of the mast-only part-way. To compensate, we have run our halyards to cleat on the foredeck and tied of the cap shrouds themselves to cleats on the sides of the boat. In addition, we had a brainstorm! We figured out we could use our old backstay chainplate as a temporary forestay chainplate, so we bolted that on and secured the forestay to it. Win! Feeling much better about the rig now.

We have also doubled up our dock lines securing Meraviglia to the dock and added pieces of old fire hose as chafe protection so the rubbing doesn’t cause the dock lines to wear through.

So, Meraviglia is as secure as we can make her. One thing’s for sure: we’re going to find out where she leaks. We already know that we have three leaky portlights and one leaky hatch in the salon. We just haven’t gotten around to fixing those yet. We did discover that there is a leak over our berth in the aft cabin yesterday. THAT was unwelcome because we are going to be getting a LOT of rain and a wet bed is really uncool. We THINK it’s from the hatch over our berth but aren’t sure. I added a bead of caulk around the hatch-maybe we’ll get lucky. The only way to fix a leaky hatch is to pull it out and rebed it with new caulk, but obviously that’s not happening right now. I was fairly comical yesterday-hunched under a tarp trying to caulk in the rain. Ah, the glamorous cruising lifestyle…

In any case, our plan now is to wait and see. We think we’ll be fine and our neighbors in the marina who have experience this before are also confident it will be okay. But, if it gets too hairy, we’ll bolt and find a hotel. There’s always insurance…