Kim Brown

Hurricane Season On A Boat – How To Survive It!

Many liveaboard cruisers spend hurricane season on a boat. We’ve now survived over four years of hurricanes. Discover what hurricane season is, what your options are for you and your boat, how to prepare for an oncoming hurricane, and learn about the things we wished we knew about!

Start Your Hurricane Prep Now!

If your boat is in a hurricane-prone area don’t wait to start planning. Well before hurricanes hit you need a plan. It’s also good to have a checklist of everything that needs to happen to prepare your boat. Get a copy of our Hurricane Checklist Guide. It includes the checklists that we used to keep our boat as safe as possible through this and several other storms.

Hurricane Season On A Boat – How To Survive It Transcripts

Simon:

Hi, welcome to Sailing Britican. I’m Simon. This is my wife, Kim.

Kim:

In this video. We’re going to talk about hurricane season on a boat. We’re going to explain what it is. We’re going to explain the options that you have, And we’re also going to tell you all the things that we wish we knew about hurricane season that nobody ever told us or that we didn’t know.

Simon:

No.

Kim:

And you don’t know what you don’t know, eh?

Simon:

Nope.

Kim:

Hurricane season, it runs from June, July, August, September, October, November so it’s six months out of the year and it’s a massive factor. When you get a boat, everything is planned around the hurricane season.

Simon:

Different insurance companies have different policies. Some start on the 1st of June, ours starts on the 1st of July, and some stop on the 1st of November where ours stops on the 15th of November. So there are all different policies and they also have different policies on where it’s safe to be. Like for us, on ours, we have to be north of Jacksonville in Florida and we’re now, we have to be south of Trinidad, but we’re going to be staying here in Granada and we’ll go on … we’ll tell you about that later.

Kim:

Yeah, and I think it’s important when you get a boat is you have to find insurance and one of the big keys is hurricane season. You know, where do you plan on being? Do you plan on being on the boat or off the boat and having it stored somewhere in a marina? So a big key to getting a boat is to look at insurance and underneath that is to look at what are you going to do for hurricane season and how much it’s going to cost you to do what you think you want to do. Okay, but let’s back up a little bit and just at first, explain what your options are that you have for hurricane season.

Simon:

The options are, you can go, you can anchor, you can go ina mooring ball, or you can go into a marina if you’re going to be staying on your boat.

Kim:

Yeah. Another option is that you can leave your boat. So you could leave your boat on a mooring ball, anchored, which I don’t suggest, either of those or in a marina. You also have the added option of hauling it out and putting it in a boatyard.

Simon:

Whether you stay on the boat or leave the boat on the hard, you want to find a place that is less likely to be hit by a hurricane.

Kim:

Yeah, and where you’re covered under your insurance. That’s the basics.

Simon:

So you’ve been watching the weather and you notice that a hurricane is coming. What are your options?

Kim:

So the first thing you can do is you can prepare your boat wherever you are. So if you’re in a marina, you’re going to put more lines on it, take all of your canvas down. If you’re in a marina for the long term, you probably took your sails off anyway. If you’re at an anchorage, you will figure it out whether or not you need to put out another anchor or takedown canvas or whatnot. Wherever you are, if a hurricane’s coming and you’re going to stay where you are, you do the best to prepare the boat.

Simon:

You can leave the boat where it is, or you can try and find a little hurricane hole or somewhere where you think you’re going to get more protection from the wind.

Kim:

Yeah, for example, we lived through two hurricanes in Charleston, and both times we thought it would be safer to take the boat away from the coast and out of the marina and up a river inland as far as possible, and we knew about that before the hurricanes came. So that’s an option. Stay where you are or take the boat and put it to a safer place.

Simon:

Another option is to get an emergency haul out. Now some boatyards offer this, but you have to get on a list and you have to pay for it in advance. If you pay for an advance and no hurricane comes, you’ve lost the money. So it’s up to you whether you want to do that.

Kim:

It’s kind of insurance, and Florida is really good at this.

Simon:

Yup.

Kim:

We knew in Charleston though, some boats never, they couldn’t get the boats out quick enough. So it’s not guaranteed that you’re going to get your boat hauled out, but it’s one of these services you need to set up now before hurricane season starts.

Kim:

A final option that you have, if you don’t want to keep the boat where it is, move it to someplace safer or have it hauled out, a final option is that you can actually sail away. Now, this only works if the hurricane’s far enough away and you have a clear way of getting out of the hurricane’s path.

Simon:

In the Caribbean, you’re more likely to do that … well, we’re happier to do that. When we were on the East Coast, we weren’t happy to do it because of the way the hurricanes come up. We could go north or south and you just don’t know if it’s going to hit you. So from my point of view, on the East Coast, that’s not really an option. Here in the Caribbean, it could be an option for you.

Kim:

Yes. Yeah. If it’s coming across and it’s starting to move up a little bit, or it’s projected, all the models are projecting into up and but it might cross over where we are, we will sail south to, aim towards South America, hang out in the water down there for a while and then come back.

Kim:

So what we wanted to talk to you about are things that we didn’t know about that kind of freaked me out, quite a few of these things. When you’re new to boating, you just, you don’t know what you don’t know. We really didn’t know a lot about hurricane season because we spent the first two years in the Mediterranean. We didn’t have to deal with this at all. So we crossed over the Atlantic. We knew we had to get out of the Caribbean by June time so our plan was to go up to America. And we did.

Simon:

And we did. And when we moved up there, we got hit with two tropical storms and two hurricanes.

Kim:

Yeah. So this is me not being very intelligent. I read our policy and it said as long as we were above Jacksonville, Florida, we were insured. So I didn’t even think about whether we were safe. I thought we were insured. So I was just looking at places where we could go to be close to my family, but also where it wasn’t getting too cold up in the north. So we went to Charleston thinking, “Oh, great places to go.” And you know, we couldn’t believe it because the year we were there, it was pretty horrific. Don’t assume that if you’re insured in a place that, that doesn’t mean that hurricanes don’t go there.

Simon:

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Another thing we didn’t realize, that marinas have hurricane plans. So I’m going in when this first hurricane is coming over and he goes, “Well, you, it looks like you’re going to have to get out.” I went, “What do you mean we’re going to have to get out?” He goes, “Well, if it’s over a Cat 1, we kick everybody out.” Where do we go? Luckily, we have some good friends there, have been there for 10 years and he goes, “Don’t worry. I know where to go,” and that’s when we made the decision to go up the river and about 30 miles up the river, which took us what we believed and hoped would be in a safer place.

Kim:

So imagine a hurricane is coming, you get a call or you’re on your boat and you think everything’s tied down. You think you’re safe. Then somebody calls up, knocks on the boat, says you need to get out.

Simon:

Yeah.

Kim:

I mean, I couldn’t believe it. So understand that when you choose where you’re going to be for hurricane season. If you are going to be in a Marina, make sure you realize what you’re going to do if you have to get out.

Simon:

And a quick point to that was that the two hurricanes that came through, they didn’t evacuate but if they had evacuated, it was just before it was going to hit. So what are you going to do?

Kim:

Yeah. The two times we did take the boat up the river, the state did evacuate the area. So we had to get in a car, leave the boat, get in a car, and drive out of the state.

Simon:

Yeah.

Kim:

So all this stuff is happening very last minute. I think if you take anything away from us today, make sure you realize that you need to understand how these things happen and what your plan is, what you’re going to do if a hurricane’s coming at you.

Simon:

Yeah.

Kim:

Okay, this is kind of like a really sad point. I totally did not expect this. There’s a lot of people out there that want a hurricane to destroy the boat. So you might do everything you possibly can to make sure your boat is okay but the people around you may not be doing the same thing. You really have to keep an eye out. If you’re in a marina, even if you have to do it yourself, tie down the boat next to you. Look around you. If you’re in an anchorage and other people are anchoring, look at how they’re anchoring. You might have to move to make sure that you’re not going to be in the way when their boat goes flying down the river or wherever. It’s a really sad point but some people can’t sell their boats and they see it as an opportunity to get insurance money. And maybe that’s why insurance is so high.

Simon:

Another thing we didn’t know about was the decisions we had to make. When you have a house, so the house can’t move so you do all the preparations for that and then you evacuate. When you have a boat, it can move. You’re thinking, “Okay, shall I go 200 miles south here? Or shall I go 200 miles north?” Because Irma, on the Thursday, Irma was coming straight for us. We were ground zero. That was the day that we moved. We took it up the river. We both looked at it and we thought it was the last time we were going to see it because it was a Cat 5 hurricane. If it had gone through where it was coming in …

Kim:

I got chills.

Simon:

Break, and we would not be sat in here right now but you can bless us, you wouldn’t have been there. We went to North Carolina, stayed there, and as it happened, it hit right down at the bottom of Florida. So that was like 800 miles away. It’s just, the options that we have that we don’t know. Are we going to be doing the right thing? If we move it, if we move it there, if we go here or we go there, is that the right option? It’s just like a minefield in your head for me.

Kim:

It’s really hard because you’ve got, like the time’s ticking. You’re seeing it come across. I feel on the East Coast of America, you have fewer options because whether you come out and go up or down who, I mean, who knows? You might as well just stay put. I think the big issue is whether you take the boat out of the marina or not. Down in the Caribbean, if you have time, yeah, you can get in the boat and sail south. You just don’t know. We didn’t realize the stress that was going to be caused by all of this. It’s just something that we didn’t know about. We want to share with you so that you can perhaps prepare yourself for it.

Kim:

The other thing we didn’t know about is having a step by step checklist of what to do to prepare your boat for a hurricane. The first one, we kind of just did everything we could. I read a bunch of logs and we … you know, we took down the sails, it took us two days. We have a video about that so I’ll put a link to the video and it shows how we prepared our boat. But after the first hurricane, I created a checklist and I actually created a guide. It’s a checklist guide just for hurricanes and it’s in our Sailing Britican store so if you want to get a copy of that. It’s really important not to forget anything. You know, you have to put something up your exhaust pipe because when hurricanes come through, the rain and water get thrown up the exhaust and if you don’t have that closed, your engine is going to get flooded with saltwater and there goes your engine.

Kim:

We saw people that didn’t take down their canvas that covers the boat. It’s shredded, it’s gone. We’ve also seen people that left sails on or wrapped their sales in a way where a little bit was left out, and the whole sail, it just blows everything away. Real important, as I said earlier, have a plan but have this checklist.

Kim:

Another important thing is too, if somebody else finds your boat or it can get to your boat before you can get to it, it might be handy to have hidden somewhere a checklist on how they can get your boat turned back on to maybe help you out. Because that happened to us. I don’t know if you want to tell that story.

Simon:

Yeah. So we’re … it was Irma again. We put the boat up the river, we anchored it and we did something with two anchors which I’ll never do again. So we got hit with a tornado, we think. There was a house, he said yeah, one came through.

Kim:

Good poles down too.

Simon:

Poles down and everything. We were pushed off the river and into the reeds, and because we prepped all the exhaust, we’ve done all the prep that we could, there was minimum to absolutely, virtually no damage at all. The only damage I think was to the outboard of the dinghy.

Kim:

Yeah, our dinghy flew away. What happened was our friends got to their boat, which was anchored next to us. They got to their boat like hours before we could get to our boat and they said, “It’s high tide. We need to pull you out of the weeds now because if it goes to low tide, you could fall over.” So we were on the phone and driving in the car racing to the boat, but it was so helpful. We walked him through where, you know, take the sock out of the exhaust and we had to explain how to turn the battery isolators on and how to start the engine and stuff, how to get the windlass working. But we were so fortunate, not only did they get us out of the reeds and re-anchored, but they managed to find our dinghy, like in the woods.

Simon:

We left our dinghy on this dock, which was just around the corner from where we’d left our boat. Unbeknown to us, the people didn’t want it on their dock, which is fair enough. So they took it because it had our name on it, they took it back to our boat and they secured it to the back of our boat. Unbeknown to us, it flew away and the engine was very sick and very poorly, bless it.

Kim:

Our neighbors found the dinghy and they put it back on the dock so that when we got there, we managed to take the dinghy and it ran good enough for us to get to the boat. So we were just thankful that Britican survived. That’s a hard story, which should have been short and it was probably very long.

Simon:

Probably. You’re probably cutting it all out anyway.

Kim:

Yes, I probably will.

Simon:

So the final point for things that we didn’t know is in our view, you have to get off the boat. We have a video of breaking in the river, this is the first one, Matthew. Our friends stayed on the boat on their boat, which was next to ours and they took a video of Britican and her gunwales were in the water and she was sailing on the anchor, gunwales in the water, I think for about 12 hours.

Simon:

Now, if we … if I’d have been on there, I would have been scared. But if Kim and Sienna had stayed on there, I think they would have been terrified. They would probably never step foot back on the boat again and I wouldn’t have blamed them and then I would have blamed me. Also, if the boat does go, you’re in the water. If you’re going to go into the water and you get knocked over in the water and it’s doing 70, 80, 100, 120 miles an hour, you’re going to die.

Kim:

Yeah.

Simon:

You’re going to die, and that happened to a family in [inaudible 00:15:24] when they were up in St. Martin. The boat started to sink so they all jumped in the water. I think it was six of them and only one survived.

Kim:

Yeah. Oh, that gives me chills too. It makes me so, so mad. I mean, a boat can be replaced. Even if, you know, it’s your home, we understand that. This boat is our home, but you cannot be replaced. The sheer horror of trying to survive on a boat in a hurricane, it’s just … yeah, get off the boat, go find shelter. I mean that’s, it’s so important.

Simon:

Yeah.

Kim:

So if you want to come sailing with us and sail through a hurricane, come on our Britican experience.

Simon:

No, because you’ll be on your own. No, I’m totally joking. However, we have sailed through, last year, we had a guest onboard and a tropical storm that like appeared from nowhere, right over the top of us. If you want to see that video, I’ll put a link to that here or there and you can watch that. We don’t advocate that we will sail you through a tropical storm, that was just a freak accident. Anyway, if you do want to come sailing with us and enjoy the beautiful sun, perfect wind, learn how to moor on mooring balls, how to anchor, how to reach the sails … what else?

Simon:

Just how to live onboard a boat.

Kim:

Yeah. If you want to join us, please look at our website. Our calendar is now open right now for obvious reasons, but when things change in the world a bit, our calendar will be open so please check it out if you want to come out sailing with us. Also, if you do have a boat and you don’t know exactly how to prepare your boat for hurricane season, please take a look at our shop. We’ve got a few guides. We’ve got checklists for sailors that’s got tons and tons of checklists. We’ve got the hurricane preparedness. We’ve got things on how to use the VHF radio and stuff. Check out our store in sailingbritican.com and I’ll put a link to it.

Kim:

Oh, and also …

Simon:

T-shirt.

Kim:

Get our t-shirts. This one says, “If you can read this, you’ve anchored too close.” That’s for all the …

Simon:

French.

Kim:

Dare I say, all the French boats that like to anchor right next to you. So … it’s all right. Okay. Anything else?

Simon:

No. Bye-bye.

Kim:

Bye.

Start Your Hurricane Prep Now!

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Hurricane Season On A Boat – How To Survive It!

Other Articles About Hurricane Season

Start Your Hurricane Prep Now!

Hurricane Season On A Boat – How To Survive It Transcripts

Other Articles About Hurricane Season

Start Your Hurricane Prep Now!