A friend of mine from St. John and I were sailing in Grenada where they haven’t had a hurricane in sixty years and sailors go to get away from them. We got the weather report that a storm was becoming more organized out in the Atlantic . Hurricanes almost always continue in a northerly direction as they head west across the ocean. It was three days away and the projected path was way north of Grenada , somewhere around St. Lucia .  So my friends and I moved our boats to a “hurricane hole” as a precautionary measure but mainly just for practice. The winds should have only got to about 50mph as far away as we were from the eye. As the storm grew nearer its projected path was slowly moving south. On the final night before the storm it became evident that this one was for the record books and could be severe. That’s when most of us decided to abandon our boats and find shelter.

Josh, my sailing friend from St. John, met a local couple that told us we could hang out at their house until the storm was over. Michelle didn’t get my message not to fly back from Chicago and I picked her up from the airport. We moved to shelter and waited. As the storm advanced the winds became stronger and louder than I could have imagined. We knew the wind would blow from the north and then from the south as the hurricane passed north of us and the barred window, facing west, allowed us to watch the whole thing. Then in the blink of an eye it got even worst. As I looked out the window the winds were so strong that all I saw was a sort of white soup. Trees were doing somersaults fifty feet in the air. That’s when the roof over the apartment above us blew off and the couple upstairs came down to hide. Then the eye passed over and we realized that the hurricane had passed directly over us and the winds would be at least 150mph, no boats would survive.

After the eye the winds did the same thing in the opposite direction. The winds started to settle after dark. We packed up the first aid kit, grabbed all the flashlights, and went down through the tree-blocked road to inspect the boat chaos. There were about five boats still floating in the bay and five piles of boats on the land. I gave Michelle my pack and crawled through the mangroves to see were my boat was. I expected it to be opened up like a piñata and all of my and Michelle’s stuff to be scattered over the hills and into the ocean. But there it was, still roped to the mangroves and still floating! I grabbed the still attached line and pulled myself to the boat. Josh’s boat Beowulf was under a dog pile so he swam over and we went to work. The water level was still up and the boats in the pile were pushed against my lines keeping me too close to shore. We cut the shorelines and pulled forward on the anchor moving my boat to safety before the storm surge receded. After meeting back up with Michelle we all passed out on my boat waiting for the morning and light to show the devastation.

It was unbelievable. Literally 90% of the roofs were blown off the houses and there were uprooted, leafless trees all around us. Everyone was walking through the streets holding machetes. Not only to cut through the trees in the road but also to protect their scatted belongings. We tried to get Josh and another friend’s boat out of the piles. We managed to pull some of the boats away but it was hopeless for Beowulf and Taiyo (my boats’ sister ship), their keels and rudders fully buried in the mud. We also started to realize that the whole island could become dangerous. The ones whose boats were lost gathered on my boat and we decided to get out of there. We made a quick stop to check out the boats in the boatyard to see if they faired.

Usually having your boat hauled out is the safest place during a hurricane. Every boat but one, about 280 in all, had toppled over like dominoes. The riots had started and it was absolute anarchy and is getting worst. We sailed away to Trinidad where I’m sending this email from. The death count will surely go up but everyone I knew there is fine. Ivan went into the record books as the strongest most southerly hurricane in recorded history.

                                                                                                     email I sent from September 2004