Surviving Sandy: The Moondust Chronicles

Moondust (left) at her pier

I wasn’t very worried about the initial northerly winds, which were forecast to gust up to 70 knots. I put double lines on Moondust, and added a wall of fenders. And I asked my neighbors if I could run lines from Moondust and the other sailboat at my pier to their docks. They graciously agreed, allowing me to diffuse the load among three different piers, while also introducing some long lines into the mix, which would add a shock cord element to the system. In the end, the boats ended up heeling to perhaps 20 degrees in the biggest gusts (the Chesapeake Bay Bridge recorded of gust of 90 mph, and sustained winds of 74 mph). But the line system worked perfectly. No lines snapped. No boats rubbed against hard wood. And no piers collapsed.

The only hitch was that while Sandy would track east and north, making landfall near Cape May, NJ, she would then head west into Pennsylvania before turning north and leaving the area. With her massive wind field (tropical storm force winds would stretch across a diameter of almost 1000 miles), that meant we would end up on the southwest quadrant of the storm and would experience very strong southwesterly and southerly winds (50-plus knots, forecast to gust over 60) before it was over.

Southwest is the one direction that is unprotected at my pier, as it opens up to a small bay of the Rhode River.

There is only about a mile or so of fetch, but my imagination started to conjure what sort of wave action, and surge, 50-knots of wind would throw up over that distance. I hoped that the forecast would change and ease, but if it didn’t, I wondered if I would regret keeping Moondust at the pier. To cope with this eventuality I got some lines to a piling outboard of my pier, and astern of both sailboats. I also kayaked out mid-creek and dropped a small, but sturdy, Danforth anchor onto the bottom, with perhaps 150 feet of scope. It dug into the bottom as soon as I started pulling it back toward the stern of Moondust, and I made it fast. The nylon rode, and all that scope, made a perfect springy spring line to prevent Moondust from jerking hard against her piling-fastened lines if big wave action started to roll up from the southwest and push her forward.

After all that, I hunkered down in the house to wait it out, and adjust lines as need be. Knowing I had done everything I could think of to protect Moondust, I relaxed. It was in fate’s hands now. Sandy blew ashore a day later. The winds howled from the north, as forecast, but that is the most protected direction for my pier. I constantly checked the local marine forecast for signs that the southwesterly would not be as bad as initially forecast. For a while it had the winds backing only as far as the west (a protected direction), and that was cause for a rum and tonic. But then the forecast reverted to a day of southwesterlies at 40-50 knots. Not good, but nothing I could do but wait and see.

As it turned out, Alex’s instincts were correct. Sandy blew in hard, but blew out at wind speeds less than forecast. I woke up to a gray, wet Tuesday morning, and the southwesterlies I had been fearing. But they were blowing at 25, gusting 30. It’s very rare that a Chesapeake sailor will consider 25 knots from the southwest to be light breeze. But after seeing gusts of 60-plus roll down my creek from the north, blowing spray off the water surface and howling fiercely, the southwesterly seemed positively meek.

There Moondust sat as the day got brighter. Bobbing easily to the wind and chop, secure in a web of lines and no worse for having endured Hurricane Sandy. So, two down, and no more to go (I hope).