I spent some time this morning studying the NOAA Irma site. You can click on any part of the darkened areas of the map and then zoom in. I think I can see that GANNET's spray hood, which I left up, and her mainsail cover are still in place.
I looked to see how the Marathon Marina, where GANNET was before I moved to the boat yard, fared. Some boats in outside slips are askew and one of the two boats stored ashore just in front of GANNET’s former slip has toppled over, her mast jutting out over the water. She would have missed GANNET, but not by much.
I was interested to see what happened to the boats in the mooring field and the free anchorage areas near the bridge.
Many boats are on the moorings. I assume they rode the storm out successfully, but perhaps traumatically for those on board. The anchorages are empty. A dozen or so boats are piled up against the bridge. More have been blown into the mangroves. Some of the anchored boats were derelicts. I doubt that any were properly anchored. They were too crowded to let out sufficient scope.
I looked at Key West as well. The boats in the marinas at Key West Bight appear to be safe, but again the anchorage areas are empty. They offer imperfect protection and are too crowded to anchor properly for serious weather. Boats are stacked up on the end of Wisteria Island.
A TV talking head proclaimed this morning that 95% of the homes in the Keys are damaged. If he means a lost shutter, perhaps. But I expect the amount of serious damage, except in the three or four keys hit first and hardest, to be much less than initially estimated.
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I received an email from Tom the other evening in which he noted statements made about boats that survived Irma, such as, “I’m so proud of her.” and “I knew she would be there for me and pull through.”
Less than an hour earlier I wrote down “fury” “wrath” “rage”. All of which were used by TV faces to describe Irma. Obviously there are just not enough intelligent people to fill TV jobs.
Irma had no wrath, fury or rage. Irma didn’t even know it was Irma. It was a huge insentient weather system. You might as well expect love from a mountain. And some people probably do.
This is called the pathetic fallacy. You probably heard of it once in an English class.
Just as storms don’t have wrath and the sea is not cruel, boats don’t pull through for us. Boats actually don’t do anything on their own. They just sit there. If the owner secured her properly and the boat isn’t struck by impossible conditions, she will remain in place. No pulling through. Just remaining.
Some sailors even name their self-steering vanes. Perhaps they are lonely and want a friend. I never even thought of naming my wind vanes. They are purely mechanical devices. You might as well name the transmission in your car.
This caused me to look up something I wrote long ago in THE OPEN BOAT:
The terrible thing about the sea is that it is not alive. All our pathetic adjectives are false. The sea is not cruel or angry or kind. The sea is insensate, a blind fragment of the universe, and kills us not in rage, but with indifference, as casual byproducts of its own unknowable harmony. Rage would be easier to understand and to accept.
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I thank Mark for sending me a link to a short interesting video about Jim Carrey as artist. His best line is: “If you are different, you have a shot at being original”.
I am going to have to rethink Jim Carrey.
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I thank Dave for sending me this paraphrase from Damon Runyon, “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s how the smart money bets.”
