sailboat caught in hurricane

A Complete Guide To Sailing In A Storm

Sailing in a storm can be a challenging experience but with the right preparation and techniques, it can be navigated safely in most instances.

While it's best to avoid storms when sailing, there are times when storms cannot be avoided.

To sail in a storm:

• Prepare the sailboat for a storm
• Monitor the weather conditions
• Adjust the sailboat to stabilize the vessel in the storm
• Maintain communication with the coast guard

The number one priority when sailing in a storm is safely navigating through the water during these bad weather conditions.

1. Prepare The Sailboat For A Storm

The first step of sailing in a storm is to prepare the sailboat for storm weather conditions.

To prepare a sailboat for a storm:

• Check the rigging & sails : Assess the rigging and sails overall condition. Ensure they are in full working order with no issues with maneuverability or rips in the sails. There should be a storm sail onboard too in preparation for sailing in the storm
• Ensure safety equipment is onboard : Ensure there are liferafts, life jackets for everyone onboard, life buoys, heaving lines, sailing jackets, flashlights, flares, VHF radios, chartplotter/GPS, first aid kits, and fire extinguishers
• Remove the boat canvas/bimini top : In preparation for sailing in a storm, remove the boat canvas/bimini top to prevent it from getting damaged or destroyed or causing injury to passengers onboard ‍
• Ensure loose items are tied down : Any loose items like lines on the deck should be tied down and secured before sailing in a storm. Loose items can become dislodged and damaged or cause injury to passengers onboard if they are not secured during a storm
• Ensure the sailboat's engine is in great condition : Ensure the sailboat's motor is in perfect condition with sufficient oil and fuel to operate during the storm

Preparing the sailboat for a storm will take approximately 30 minutes to complete. This timeframe will vary depending on the size of the vessel and the amount of equipment needed to be purchased and installed onboard.

In preparing for sailing in a storm, there is certain sailboat equipment needed. The equipment needed for sailing in a storm includes a storm sail, heaving lines, sailing jackets, life jackets, life buoys, liferafts, first aid kit, Chartplotter/GPS, fire extinguishers, VHF radio, and flares.

The benefits of preparing the sailboat for a storm are a sailor will be prepared for any issues caused by the storm and a sailor will have the necessary safety equipment to help keep everyone onboard safe during the storm.

One downside of preparing the sailboat for a storm is it can be costly (over $500) especially if the sailor does not have all the right equipment needed to withstand the stormy weather. However, this is a small downside.

2. Monitor The Weather Conditions

The second step of sailing in a storm is to monitor the weather conditions regularly.

To monitor the weather conditions:

• Connect to the VHF radio weather channel : Connect to channel 16 on the VHF radio as this channel provides storm warnings and urgent marine information for boaters
• Use a chartplotter : Modern chartplotters will have marine weather data for boaters to monitor the weather conditions and check windspeeds, rainfall levels, wave height and other relevant marine weather data
• Check a marine weather forecast provider website : If you have internet access on the sailing trip, connect to a marine weather provider for marine weather forecast information in your area

In sailing, weather conditions are considered a storm when the wind speed is 28 knots or higher and the wave heights are 8ft or higher. Other characteristics of stormy weather when sailing is poor visibility with visibility ranges of under half a mile (0.8km or less) and heavy rain with a precipitation rate of at least 0.1 inches (2.5 millimeters) per hour.

It can take approximately 3 to 6 hours for a storm to fully develop when sailing. However, for larger storms, it can take over 2 days for the storm to fully develop.

Monitoring the weather should be done every 20 minutes when sailing in a storm to get up-to-date information on potential nearby locations with better weather to sail to.

The benefit of regularly monitoring the weather conditions is a sailor will be more prepared for the weather that lies ahead and the sailor will be able to make adjustments to their sailing route to help avoid the bad weather.

3. Adjust The Sailboat To Stabilize The Vessel

The third step of sailing in a storm is to adjust the sailboat to stabilize the vessel.

When sailing through the storm, reef the sails to reduce the stress and load on the mast and sails, attach the storm sails, turn the vessel until the wave and wind direction are blowing from the stern of the sailboat, i.e. the wind is blowing downwind. Carefully tack the sailboat slowly until the boat is in the downwind position. Pointing the sailboat downwind is not recommended if the sailboat is near land as it could cause the boat to run into the land.

Alternatively, if the storm is very bad, sailors can perform a "heaving to" storm sailing maneuver.

To perform the heave-to storm sailing maneuver:

• Turn the bow of the boat into the wind : This involves turning the sailboat so that the bow faces into the wind. This will cause the boat to lose forward momentum and begin to drift backward
• Adjust the sails : Depending on the size and configuration of your boat, you may need to adjust the sails in different ways. In general, you will want to position the sails so that they are catching less wind and are working against each other. This will help to slow the boat's drift and keep it from moving too quickly
• Adjust the rudder : You may need to adjust the rudder to keep the boat from turning too far or too fast. In general, you will want to angle the rudder slightly to one side to counteract the wind and keep the boat on a stable course
• Monitor the boat's drift : Once you have heaved-to, you will need to monitor the boat's drift and make small adjustments as needed to maintain your position. This may involve adjusting the sails, rudder, or other factors as conditions change

The heaving to maneuver is used to reduce a sailboat's speed and maintain a stationary position. This is often done in rough weather to provide the crew with a stable platform to work from or to wait out a storm.

This sailing maneuver will adjust the sailboat and should stabilize the vessel in the storm.

The benefits of adjusting the sailboat position in a storm are it will help to stabilize the boat, it will improve safety, it will reduce the crew's fatigue as the crew will not be operating with a boat at higher speeds, it will help maintain control of the sailboat, and it will reduce stress on the sailboat and the rigging system.

Depending on the size of the sailboat, how bad the weather conditions are, and a sailor's experience level, adjusting the sailboat to stabilize it in the storm should take approximately 10 minutes to complete.

4. Maintain Communication With The Coast Guard

The fourth step of sailing in a storm is to maintain communication with the coast guard.

This is particularly important if the storm is over Beaufort Force 7 when sailing is much harder.

To maintain communication with the coast guard during a storm:

• Understand the important VHF channels : During sailing in a storm, be aware of VHF international channel 16 (156.800 MHz) which is for sending distress signals
• Ensure there are coast guard contact details on your phone : Put the local coast guard contact details into your phone. These contact details are not substitutes for using the VHF channel 16 distress signal or dialing 911. These contact details should only be contacted if all else fails

Contacting the coast guard takes less than 1 minute to complete and they are fast to respond in case of an emergency caused by the storm.

The benefits of maintaining communication with the coast guard during a storm are it will help improve safety, the coast guard will be able to provide real-time alerts, and it will provide navigation assistance as the coast guard has access to the latest navigation technology and can guide you through the storm's hazardous areas such as shallow waters or areas with a strong current.

Frequently Asked Questions About Sailing In A Storm

Below are the most commonly asked questions about sailing in a storm.

What Should You Do If You're Caught Sailing In A Storm With Your Boat?

if you're caught sailing in a storm with your boat, you should reef the sails, attach the storm sails and tack the vessel slowly until the wave and wind direction are blowing from the stern of the sailboat.

Should You Drop An Anchor When Sailing In A Storm?

Dropping an anchor can be a useful technique to help keep a boat steady during a storm. However, whether or not to drop an anchor depends on a variety of factors including the size and type of the boat, the severity of the storm, the water depth, and the type of bottom (i.e., mud, sand, or rock).

If you are in a smaller boat that is being pushed around by the waves, dropping an anchor can help keep the boat oriented in a particular direction, reducing the boat's drift. Additionally, it can help reduce the risk of capsizing or being thrown onto a rocky shore.

However, if the storm is very severe with high winds and waves, the anchor may not be enough to hold the boat in place, and it may put undue stress on the anchor and the boat's attachment points. In such a case, it is usually better to try to navigate to a sheltered area or to deploy sea anchors that can help reduce the boat's drift.

It is also essential to be careful when anchoring in a storm as it can be challenging to set the anchor correctly and the wind and waves can cause the anchor to drag.

Is It Safe To Sail In A Storm?

Sailing in a storm should be avoided due to the lack of safety. However, experienced sailors can sail in storms up to Beaufort Force 7 if required. Beaufort Force 8 and higher storms are extremely dangerous to sail in and should be avoided at all costs.

How Do You Improve Safety When Sailing In A Storm?

To improve safety when sailing in a storm, wear a life jacket, hook everyone onboard up to a safety line or harness so they don't fall overboard, reef the sail to improve the sailboat's stability, and understand where all the safety equipment is onboard and how to operate it in case of an emergency.

What Type Of Storm Should Not Be Sailed In?

A sailor should not sail in any storm but especially a storm from Beaufort Force 8 to Beaufort Force 12 as it is considered to be too dangerous.

Can You Sail Through A Hurricane?

While sailors have successfully sailed through hurricanes in the past, sailing through a hurricane should be avoided at all costs. Sailing in hurricane weather is too dangerous and could result in loss of life.

What Are The Benefits Of Sailing In A Storm?

The benefits of sailing in a storm are:

• Improves sailing skills : Sailing in a storm will force sailors to improve their sailing skills and increase their ability to handle rough seas
• Exciting experience : For some sailors, the thrill of navigating through a storm can be an exhilarating experience that they enjoy. The adrenaline rush and sense of accomplishment of successfully sailing through a storm can be incredibly rewarding
• Greater appreciation for the power of nature : Sailing in a storm can provide a unique perspective on the power of nature. It can be humbling and awe-inspiring to witness the raw force of the wind and waves and this can lead to a greater appreciation for the natural world

It's important to note that these potential benefits should never come at the expense of safety. For the majority of sailors, it is smarter to avoid sailing in a storm and instead wait for the bad weather to pass.

What Are The Risks Of Sailing In A Storm?

The risks of sailing in a storm are:

• Boat sinking/capsizing : With high winds over 28 knots and waves and swells at heights over 8ft, there is a risk of the sailboat capsizing and sinking
• People drowning : High winds and high waves during a storm can cause people onboard to fall overboard and drown
• Loss of communication : Bad storm weather can cause the sailboat's communication system to stop working making it much harder to signal for help if needed
• Boat damage : Storm weather can damage the boat including the sails, mast, rigging system, lines, Bimini top, etc.
• Poor visibility : Sea spray, large waves over 8ft, and heavy winds over 28 knots can reduce the visibility to under 500 meters in some instances making it difficult for navigation
• People being injured : People onboard can get injured due to the increase and sharp movements caused by the storm

What Should Be Avoided When Sailing In A Storm?

When sailing in a storm, avoid:

• Getting caught sailing in the storm in the first place : Ideally, a sailor should avoid sailing in the storm in the first place by checking the weather radar and instead wait for the weather to clear before continuing their sailing trip
• Increasing the sail area : Increasing the sail area in a storm should be avoided as it can cause the sailboat to become more unstable and increase the risk of capsizing
• Not wearing a life jacket : Life jackets should be worn at all times when sailing but especially during a storm. Avoid not wearing a life jacket in a storm as there is no protection if someone falls overboard
• Not wearing the appropriate gear to stay dry : Sailors should avoid not wearing the appropriate foul weather gear to stay dry when sailing in a storm
• Not connecting the crew to safety lines/harness : When sailing in a storm, all crew on the boat deck should be
• Not understanding the safety equipment : Sailors should avoid not understanding the safety equipment onboard

How Do You Avoid Sailing In A Storm?

To avoid sailing in a storm, check the weather forecast regularly when going on a sailing trip to know when and where not to sail as the weather gets worse in these areas. If a sailing trip involves passing through a storm, wait in an area where there is no storm until the weather clears up in the storm area before continuing on the voyage.

What Are The Best Sailboats For Sailing In A Storm?

The best sailboats for sailing in a storm are the Nordic 40, Hallberg-Rassy 48, and the Outremer 55.

What Are The Worst Sailboats For Sailing In A Storm?

The worst sailboats for sailing in a storm are sailing dinghies as they offer little protection from the dangers of stormy weather.

What Is The Best Sized Sailboat For Sailing In A Storm?

The best-sized sailboats to sail in a storm are sailboats sized 30ft. and longer.

What Is The Worst Sized Sailboat For Sailing In A Storm?

The worst-sized sailboats to sail in a storm are sailboats sized under 30ft. as it is more difficult to handle rough weather and choppy waves in these boats.

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Multiple Agencies Assist in Rescue of Couple on Sailboat Caught in Hurricane Lee Swells

Lieutenant Commander Alex Martfeld of US Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod flying the helicopter that was sent out to rescue two individuals aboard a 24-foot sailboat in the waters off Westhampton Beach on Friday afternoon. COURTESY USCG AIR STATION CAPE COD

From left, Aviation Maintenance Technician (hoist operator) Second Class Gary Hardigree, Aviation Survival Technician (rescue swimmer) Third Class Gregory Gibson, Lieutenant (co-pilot) Tanner Evans, and Lieutenant Commander Alex Martfeld were the team on the scene of the search-and-rescue mission to take two individuals in distress off a sailboat that was being tossed around in swells from Hurricane Lee on Friday in the waters off Westhampton Beach. COURTESY USCG AIR STATION CAPE COD

Two individuals in distress aboard a 27-foot sailboat being tossed around in high surf from Hurricane Lee in the ocean waters off Westhampton Beach were rescued by a helicopter dispatched from the United States Coast Guard Station in Cape Cod on Friday afternoon.

Two men in distress aboard a 25-foot sailboat tossed around in high surf from Hurricane Lee in the ocean waters off Westhampton Beach were pulled to safety after a dramatic helicopter rescue carried out by four members of the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod on Friday afternoon.

The small boat, which the rescuers estimated was no more than five feet wide, was first spotted by an individual walking on the shore at Coopers Beach in Southampton Village, who put out a 911 call, which went to the Suffolk County Police Department. County Police transferred the call to the Southampton Village Police Department, which had officers down on the beach within two minutes, according to Police Chief Suzanne Hurteau.

The pair were ultimately plucked from the waters next to their sailboat by a trained Coast Guard rescue swimmer, who guided them, one at a time, into a rescue basket that was pulled up to the MH-60 helicopter hovering nearby, before taking them and the crew back on the 20-minute flight to the station on Cape Cod.

The harrowing rescue required the coordination of several different agencies from two states, and Hurteau said on Saturday morning that the boaters were “lucky to be alive.”

Because neither of the two men on board the vessel spoke English, the rescue required additional assistance from a translator from Coast Guard Sector Long Island Sound, which Lieutenant Commander Alex Martfeld, who flew the rescue helicopter, said was key.

The rescue effort began at 10 a.m. on Friday morning, when the Southampton Village Police Department, Southampton Village Volunteer Ambulance, and Southampton Fire Department were all activated after the 911 call. One Village Police officer followed the sailboat from the shore, in a truck, trying to keep track of it, as the boat was initially only about 200 feet offshore.

Another officer deployed the department’s drone, which provided closeup footage of the boat and allowed the department to ascertain that there were two people on board, including one who appeared to be having difficulty navigating the boat.

Hurteau said the work of the Southampton Village dispatchers was crucial in the rescue operation, which unfolded over the course of several hours.

“When our drone was put up, our dispatcher called Suffolk Aviation, and it located the vessel,” Hurteau said. “They were in contact with the Coast Guard, and the Coast Guard was in constant contact with the captain of the boat.”

The boat captain confirmed that they were in distress and were also low on fuel. The other individual on board was also reported to be severely seasick.

The Coast Guard Station in Cape Cod handles all maritime emergencies from the New York City area to the northeastern tip of Maine, near the Canadian border, keeping the rescue helicopter stocked and ready to go, with a crew on call, 24/7. Once deployed, the helicopter took only 20 minutes to arrive on the scene from the Cape Cod station, and Martfeld said the presence of the Suffolk County helicopter hovering in the area until they arrived help cut down on the time it would have taken to locate the sailboat. By the time the Coast Guard arrived, the boat had drifted much farther out to sea from where it was originally spotted off Coopers, and was in the Westhampton Beach vicinity.

It quickly became clear to Martfeld and his crew — which included his co-pilot, Lieutenant Tanner Evans, Aviation Maintenance Technician Second Class Gary Hardigree (the hoist operator), and Aviation Survival Technician third class Gregory Gibson (the rescue swimmer) — that the men on board needed to be pulled to safety immediately.

Figuring out the best way to do that required some adjusting, but they got the job done.

“While we were en route, the translator told us that they wanted to come off the boat, and that they were running low on fuel, and weren’t able to sail anymore and were disoriented,” Martfeld said, adding that the men had initially set sail from New Rochelle and had made it through the sound and around Montauk before running into trouble in what was an attempt to get back to their home port in South Amboy, New Jersey.

“We noticed as we were flying along the south shore of Long Island westbound that there was pretty big breaking surf right on the beach. The swells offshore were big, but there was a long period between each wave. It wasn’t too rough, but the swells were just large enough that it would make it hard for them to see land.”

Martfeld estimated that the swells were roughly 10 foot when they arrived, with strong but steady winds. The steadiness of the wind enables the helicopter to hold a “good, steady hover,” Martfeld said. The initial plan was to send Gibson down onto the boat and rescue the men, one at a time, directly from the boat using the rescue basket.

But that plan A did not pan out.

Through the translator, they tried to ask the men to get underway to optimally position the boat for the rescue, but they struggled to do that. Eventually, they witnessed one of the men toss a paddleboard that had been on the boat into the water and saw him approach the ladder in what looked like an attempt to get off the boat on his own. At that point, Martfeld said they decided to send Gibson into the water, so he could assist the men from there, rather than attempt to do the hoist directly from the boat.

Gibson then swam over to the boat, got on board, and helped the older gentleman into the water with him, getting him to an area where Hardigree was able to lower the rescue basket. Once he was pulled up and into the helicopter, Gibson swam back over to the boat and assisted the other passenger. Finally, Hardigree lowered the harness clip and pulled Gibson back up to the helicopter, leaving the scene to fly back to the station in Cape Cod around 2 p.m.

“Our rescue swimmer and flight mechanic did an excellent job," Martfeld said, adding that it was Gibson’s first in-water rescue.

While the rescue was certainly a harrowing ordeal that the men on the boat will never forget, it is not necessarily an uncommon occurrence, according to Martfeld.

“As far as difficulty [of the rescue] goes, no two search-and-rescue cases and no two hoists are the same,” he said. “This my third tour; I’ve served in Astoria, Oregon, and Kodiak, Alaska, so I’ve seen a lot of rescues similar to this one. I don’t keep track of how many folks I’ve pulled out of the water or how many hoists I’ve done, but it probably happens five or six times per year.”

As for the local agencies on the ground that assisted in the early stages of the rescue, they agreed it was a good coordination of efforts, and effective utilization of different tools they had at their disposal.

Hurteau said the Village Police drone came in particularly handy. “It was really helpful,” she said. “We have two officers who carry it at all times for situations just like this. The footage was so clear, and it let us know that two people were on board.”

Hurteau also praised the multiple agencies that were involved or assisted in coordinating the rescue, and said the dispatchers in particular were key in pulling it all together.

“This was all possible because our dispatchers were really on top of getting aviation out right away,” she said. “They notified the Coast Guard to get a crew together behind the scenes, working the radio and phones.

“It was a true crisis,” she continued. “They were instrumental in getting all the crew out there. They really are the backbone of any emergency situation for us.”

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Sailboat Caught In Rare Hurricane Near Hawaii

The U.S. Coast Guard is working to rescue a sailboat about 400 miles off the coast of Oahu after it got caught in Hurricane Julio, one of two rare tropical cyclones affecting Hawaii over the weekend.

Hurricane Julio never actually hit the islands, instead diverting north. The National Weather Service also downgraded the storm to a category 1 hurricane over the weekend after wind speeds decreased. (Video via KGMB )

But the U.S. Coast Guard says  it received a distress signal from a sailboat with three people aboard drifting off shore Sunday. The boat's lifeboat and hatch cover were blown away by the hurricane winds.

Accuweather says the Guard sent a plane to deliver a pump to aid in flooding within the boat. Attempts to drop off life rafts failed due to the rough conditions, forcing the crew will remain with the boat until a rescue ship arrives.

According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser , that boat was expected to arrive on scene Sunday night. As of early Monday morning there were no updates on the status of that rescue mission or the condition of the passengers.

Again, Hurricane Julio was just one of two storms to threatened Hawaii within the past week.

Thousands are still without power after tropical storm    ​Iselle, initially classified as a hurricane, blew through the main island Friday, knocking over trees and destroying homes. (Video via KHNL )

The storms prompted residents to prepare for the kind of weather they rarely ever face , as the last hurricane to hit Hawaii was 22 years ago. The Scientific American explains high pressure during hurricane season usually causes storms to steer clear of the islands.

One death has been reported due to the recent storms. A High Surf Warning remains in effect until Monday morning.

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Hurricanes of Data: The Tiny Craft Mapping Superstorms at Sea

By Porter Fox May 9, 2023

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The Tiny Craft Mapping Superstorms at Sea

Hurricanes of Data

By Porter Fox

Illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook

Infographics by La Tigre

Throughout history, most sea captains have tried to steer their vessels out of extreme weather, but the whole purpose of SD 1045 was to steer into it. “The goal was not just to get into the hurricane but to get to the strongest quarter,” Jenkins said as we watched a video of the storm, shot from SD 1045’s masthead camera. “The big engineering challenge was to create enough sailing power to get in front of the storm, but not so much power that the storm destroys the boat.”

Jenkins and a crew of pilots in Saildrone’s cavernous mission-control room, set in a 1930s Navy hangar on the shores of San Francisco Bay, had been using a satellite link for months to maneuver SD 1045 and four sister ships into North Atlantic hurricanes. The boats were frequently caught in doldrums and set back by powerful ocean currents skirting the East Coast of the United States. That August, a sister ship, SD 1031, successfully entered Tropical Storm Henri, but only in its early stages. With a few weeks left in the 2021 hurricane season, SD 1045 appeared to be the last opportunity to get a Saildrone inside a major hurricane, where it would try to harvest data that could help scientists develop a more sophisticated understanding of why such storms’ intensity has spiked over the last half-century.

As climate change has accelerated, warmer atmospheric and ocean temperatures have increased the likelihood of a hurricane developing into a Category 3 storm or higher by 8 percent per decade . While the total number of tropical cyclones — including “typhoons” and “cyclones” — around the world has dropped over the last century, in the North Atlantic more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes made landfall in the United States from 2017 to 2021 than from 1963 to 2016. Globally, the number of major hurricanes, including a new breed of ultraintense Category 5 storms with winds of at least 190 m.p.h. , could increase by 20 percent over the next 60 to 80 years. Once-established storm tracks are simultaneously changing as hurricanes last longer and penetrate deeper over land . According to a 2021 study by Yale University researchers, warmer waters will soon draw extreme storms north as well, threatening to inundate densely populated cities like Washington, D.C.; New York; Providence, R.I.; and Boston .

Storm surges now ride on an elevated sea level, flooding coastlines with walls of water more than 25 feet high (Hurricane Katrina, 2005). Because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, storms can now dump more than 60 inches of rain on a single region (Hurricane Harvey, 2017). Hurricanes over the United States have also slowed more than 15 percent since 1947 , contributing to a 25 percent increase in local rainfall. One example of how the compounding forces of climate change, like sea-level rise, and more intense storms are overwhelming coastlines, according to Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: If Superstorm Sandy had occurred in 1912 instead of 2012, it may not have flooded Lower Manhattan .

Humans didn’t always settle in a manner so disconnected from the planet: Overlay storm tracks from the last two centuries on a map of the world, and you’ll notice how, throughout history, most major cities were built outside their reach. As that reach and intensity grows farther and faster than any time in the last three million years, another reality becomes painfully evident: Civilization can’t relocate as it once could, leaving millions of people smack in the cross hairs of severe storms with little to no resiliency, warning or even plan.

At risk on the U.S. mainland are 60 million coastal residents from Texas to Maine . Along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, you will find a dozen major seaside cities, thousands of coastal towns, half of the nation’s oil-refining business and major infrastructure like highways, airports, freight-rail lines and much of the shipping industry, which is already backed up globally with supply-chain issues as it transports, by tonnage, 90 percent of all trade across the ocean. A recent N.P.R. analysis of National Hurricane Center data revealed that 720,000 residents of Miami, Washington and New York are in danger of being flooded by rising sea levels and storm surge. In the last four decades alone, hurricanes cost the United States more than $1.1 trillion and nearly 7,000 lives. By the end of the century, they could set the United States back over $100 billion annually.

Jenkins knows firsthand the ferocity of maritime storms. His windswept hair and tanned crow’s feet are more befitting a sea captain than a San Francisco tech entrepreneur. He grew up building boats in Southampton, England, then sailed yachts around Europe and the Mediterranean as a delivery captain. He prefers two-dimensional landscapes to the hustle of the city. After studying mechanical engineering at Imperial College London, he spent a decade car-camping in salt flats and dry lake beds around the world, trying to best the obscure (yet highly competitive) land-speed record for a wind-powered vehicle. When he finally broke it — and almost himself, while steering the land yacht at 126 m.p.h. across the Mojave Desert — he pivoted his design to ocean sailing and a new mission: building the first unmanned boat to sail around the world.

Jenkins found an unlikely partner in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the sprawling parent organization of all U.S. weather agencies. Hurricane research, modeling and forecasting requires many terabytes of data for every square mile the storm passes through, including vitally important sea-level data from inside a storm. This has, for obvious reasons, been nearly impossible to obtain. Several generations of automated buoys, subsurface sea gliders and dropsondes — launched from turboprop Hurricane Hunter aircraft in the middle of a storm — have been employed to measure the “planetary boundary” between sea and sky, where a hurricane gets its power. But most of the devices offer only a snapshot of conditions. Jenkins’s contribution to the endeavor is a Swiss Army knife of oceanic observation that can maneuver into a storm and measure air, surface and subsea data in real time, without the cost of fuel, provisions or human lives.

Jenkins walked me around the Saildrone factory floor that morning, speaking quickly, often without pausing for minutes or even an hour at a time. He plays the role of engineer, chief executive, inventor, climatologist, oceanographer, naval architect and captain on any given day — a corporeal C.P.U. of the company. He touched on everything from hydrodynamics to hurricane structure to electrical engineering and bathymetry — ocean mapping — as we wandered among four neat rows of gleaming Saildrone hulls. Gunmetal-gray steel racks and wheeled carts held appendages and instruments, all fabricated in-house and “ruggedized” by Saildrone and NOAA. The company is based in Alameda Point, a hub of the techno-utopianism that has swept through the Bay Area. (Jenkins occasionally commutes by motorboat from his home in Alameda.) Just down the block, researchers are developing a safer nuclear reactor. A few doors away is the former factory of Makani, a project founded by a consortium of kite-surfing inventors who added wind turbines to giant kites to create energy, à la Ben Franklin.

A half-dozen workers meandered between boats as Jenkins took me to the boardroom to watch the video of SD 1045. Wind gusts hit 120 m.p.h. in what would become one of the longest-lasting North Atlantic hurricanes on record. Hurricane Sam had recently reorganized and ratcheted up from Category 3 to the upper range of Category 4. Sea spray and rain turned the air into a foggy emulsion; breaking waves slammed the boat with the force of a tractor-trailer. Two hours later, on the edge of the eye wall, the scene on Jenkins’s screen became otherworldly, with 143-m.p.h. gusts and 89-foot waves.

Few vessels could withstand the vectors moving through the North Atlantic that day. (In 2015, Hurricane Joaquin’s monster waves severed the top two decks of the steel freighter El Faro’s superstructure, sending the 790-foot ship to the bottom of the ocean along with all 33 crew members.) But SD 1045 persevered, its gauges recording multiple knockdowns, 360-degree capsizes and a 30-m.p.h. sleigh ride down the back of a giant wave.

As the pilot managed to maneuver the ship closer to the storm’s eye — a Dantesque arena of minitornadoes, falling sheets of ice, hot tower thunderheads and torrential wind and rain bands — Jenkins and a dozen NOAA scientists across the country turned to a never-before-seen stream of data broadcast from the heart of the hurricane: air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, water temperature, salinity, sea-surface temperature and wave height. Watching it was like watching transmissions from a Mars rover — columns of numbers and decimal points broadcast from an alien world gradually sketching a detailed picture of the cyclone. If this level of data could consistently be harvested from hurricanes at sea, Jenkins and his colleagues realized, it could very well change our understanding of one of the most damaging, costly and deadly forms of natural disaster in the world.

It stretches for 139 million square miles and is on average more than 10,000 feet deep. Anyone who has spent time on or near it knows that watching the sea is like watching a fire: It is always transforming, moving, reordering as it mixes and flows. It is no more a “thing” than deep space is a thing — more conceptual than it is representational. It is physis , as the ancient Greeks wrote, translated as “nature,” “creation” or “growth.”

The quest to study the sea and its storms predates Aristotle, who hypothesized that Earth’s oceans were frigid at the poles and too hot to inhabit near the Equator. Half a century before Christopher Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal dispatched a series of expeditions along the coast of Africa in what was in part one of the first Western maritime data-harvesting missions in history. (Keep in mind that sea monsters were considered a navigational hazard by many at the time.) His captains returned with observations detailing sea temperature, zoological discoveries and curious and persistent winds and currents, the volta do mar , that allowed them to sail with the breeze behind them in a giant circle from Portugal down to the Canary Islands, up to the Azores and home. Over the next 400 years, these and other “trade winds” and the currents they pushed would carry human civilization around the world, along with a breed of superstorm unknown to Westerners.

Only satellite images can give a true sense of the symmetry and stunning size of a mature tropical cyclone: a vortex of wind and moisture up to a thousand miles in diameter that bends with the curvature of the planet. A single storm can blot out the coastline between Maine and Florida and generate more than 200 times the energy that the world’s power plants create in a single day. (Or the power of 240 10-megaton nuclear bombs detonated every 20 minutes; take your pick.) Over millions of years, these storms have carved coastlines and ocean basins. They have wiped out entire ecosystems and redistributed others across oceans. They can even transport their own avian community of shearwaters, frigatebirds, petrels and songbirds that may fly above or become trapped in the relatively calm eye of the storm for many miles, only to be unceremoniously dumped on the shores of a distant place.

The Gulf Coast, with its warm, shallow water and troublesome Loop Current, has seen more than three dozen major hurricanes since 1851. But it is Florida that holds the distinction of being the most hurricane-prone state in the country. More than 100 tropical cyclones have made landfall there in the same time span, making locals who experienced some of those storms wonder if the current influx of newcomers to the Sunshine State will pack up and leave after their first hurricane season.

Greg Foltz of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (A.O.M.L.) lives on relatively high ground among the neat, terra-cotta-capped bungalows of Coral Gables. He met me at a concrete picnic pavilion on Miami’s Virginia Key, a hundred yards from the Bauhausian A.O.M.L. campus. Foltz is a willowy 46 years old, soft-spoken, with a salty nerdiness that perhaps only an oceanographer can achieve. He grew up with the thrum of nor’easters, squalls and the occasional hurricane outside Boston before joining NOAA in 2010. He is now lead principal investigator of the Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic (PIRATA) Northeast Extension and its array of red-and-white research buoys, outfitted for oceanographic observation and hurricane forecasting.

One of Foltz’s duties is finding new tech to expand and improve the observation system. After colleagues at his former lab, NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (P.M.E.L.) in Seattle, told him about Saildrones, he set up a meeting to discuss building a drone that could record the inner workings of a hurricane. Jenkins had been collaborating with NOAA for four years, fine-tuning instruments and redesigning the hull and sail plan. Foltz wrote a grant and secured SD 1045 and four other drones for the 2021 hurricane season. The morning of Sept. 30, he watched from a makeshift home office as SD 1045 sailed into Hurricane Sam.

Amid a flurry of congratulatory text messages that morning, Foltz homed in on an anomaly in the drone’s data stream. Sam had undergone rapid intensification, during which a storm’s maximum winds increase 35 m.p.h. or more in 24 hours. The phenomenon, which is difficult to forecast and often occurs just before landfall, has become a priority for U.S. weather agencies, as it often leaves coastal residents expecting a mild storm only to be walloped by a Category 3 or 4 hurricane. Rapid intensification used to spin up once a century, but studies show that in the future, it could occur more frequently — especially in waters bordering the East Coast. In 2020 alone, 10 Atlantic hurricanes underwent rapid intensification . The next year, Hurricane Ida’s winds jumped to 150 m.p.h. from 85 just before making landfall in New Orleans and Alabama, ominously on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

The readings Foltz noticed indicated that surface temperatures beneath Sam were higher than normal. Typically, evaporation and ocean mixing beneath a hurricane cools surface water near the eye. But SD 1045 indicated that the surface was not cooling. It was warming up, creating a storm with no bridle.

The readings were so off that Foltz assumed a gauge had broken. He checked SD 1045’s wind-speed figures against a nearby research buoy and saw similar numbers. He also noticed low salinity in the water and confirmed those readings with satellite data. Weeks later, after poring over the data, Foltz and his colleagues concluded that a pool of fresh water — which is less dense than salt water and floats on top of it — had likely blocked upwelling currents from cooling the surface.

The discovery provided further evidence in an area that had confounded meteorologists for decades. Two months after Hurricane Sam veered northeast and sputtered out southeast of Greenland, NOAA sent out a news release titled “Measuring Salt in the Ocean May Be Key to Predicting Hurricane Intensity.” The release outlined how the outflow of the Amazon, Orinoco and Mississippi Rivers could potentially obstruct upwelling and ocean mixing beneath storms. Further study the next spring illustrated how increased rainfall in today’s supersaturated storms could also dump enough freshwater to reduce upwelling and ocean cooling, making intensification more likely.

Foltz took a summary of his findings to the National Hurricane Center. “Now they’re starting to appreciate that salinity can affect hurricane intensity,” he says.

A month after SD 1045 safely sailed back to port, a disturbance in the Pacific Ocean developed into a tropical depression. The storm was named Rai, and two days later it became a Category 1 typhoon. As the storm bore down on the volcanic ridgelines and montane rainforests hemming the Philippines, rapid intensification took it from the equivalent of a Category 1 Atlantic hurricane to a supertyphoon, equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 160 m.p.h.

In 48 hours, Rai decimated thousands of villages, killed more than 400 people, drove seven million from their homes and inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damage — including postponing a mass coronavirus vaccination effort. Rai was not the first storm to hit the Philippines in 2021. Fourteen other gales overran the islands earlier that year, sometimes just weeks apart. And four months later, Tropical Storm Megi killed more than 150, wiped out several villages with landslides and displaced more than a million people.

With their billions in damages and clever National Hurricane Center tweets — “Kate Still a Poorly Organized Depression” — Atlantic hurricanes represent just 16 percent of all annual tropical cyclones. Hurricane basins in the Pacific that border Australia, Indonesia, Fiji, Japan and the Philippines get 60 percent of the storms, while 24 percent roam the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific . Called typhoons when they originate in the Northwest Pacific and cyclones in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, the storms are identical in all but name to hurricanes. They are also growing stronger as the ocean warms beneath them.

Nowhere is this incongruity more evident than in weather- and climate-related natural disasters — which increased fivefold globally from 1970 to 2019 , with 91 percent of associated deaths occurring in the developing world. The proportion of Category 4 and 5 typhoons making landfall in East and Southeast Asia appears to have increased, with storms lasting longer, penetrating farther inland and causing vastly more damage. A 2016 study found that the average intensity of all typhoons in the region had grown by 12 to 15 percent from 1977 to 2014. Typhoon Koppu in 2015 dumped 35 inches of rain on the Philippines, and Cyclone Freddy in February became the longest, most powerful tropical cyclone in any ocean basin in history after destroying large swaths of Madagascar and Mozambique. There is no longer respite from typhoon season in the western North Pacific, either. Storm season now essentially lasts all year .

Damage and loss of life on the low-lying, densely populated coastlines of Asia and Africa — typically with little to no resiliency or early-warning systems — is beyond compare. Some of the most infamous storms in history made landfall there: the 1970 Bhola cyclone, which pushed a 33-foot-tall storm surge across the Ganges Delta in what is now Bangladesh, with an estimated death toll as high as 500,000; Typhoon Nina in 1975 and a resulting dam failure, which took more than 150,000 lives in China’s Henan Province; and Myanmar’s Cyclone Nargis in 2008, with more than 100,000 dead or missing after a 13-foot storm surge swept across the Irrawaddy Delta.

Lack of data and accurate forecasting is largely to blame for the high casualty rate. Much of the region still uses weather balloons to gauge atmospheric conditions, and a lack of reliable electricity makes automated weather stations and data transmission difficult. About one-third of the world’s population has no access to extreme-weather early-warning systems — including a stunning 60 percent of people in Africa. A 2019 report by the Global Commission on Adaptation addressed the shortfall, outlining how an $800 million investment in forecasting could avoid up to $16 billion in weather-related damage. The United Nations took up the challenge in 2021 at its climate conference, COP26, in Glasgow. The next year it promised technology within five years that will deliver storm warnings to every region on the planet.

One presentation at COP26 addressed the scarcity of ocean-data collection vital to understanding tropical cyclones and climate change in general — not just in the developing world but everywhere. More than 80 percent of the ocean has yet to be mapped in high definition, and hardly any of it is being empirically monitored and measured regularly . Oceanographers often point out that appropriations for NASA’s deep-space exploration outpaces ocean exploration by more than 150 to 1 — to the point that scientists know more about the surface of Mars than they do about our own seas, which play an outsize role in the climate crisis and are far more important to the survival of our species. Forecasters and climate modelers, who rely heavily on ocean data, may have to use estimated numbers in their calculations, opening the door to potential large-scale errors in the planet’s carbon budget and all-important global-warming estimates.

The presenter, the NOAA oceanographer Adrienne Sutton, argued that this “black hole of data” is hampering our understanding of how the ocean is changing and how those changes affect food webs, carbon sequestration, weather and storms. To date, the world’s oceans have taken in around 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases and more than 30 percent of carbon dioxide emitted by human activity. This role as buffer, which has most likely saved humanity from certain and swift extinction, has come with consequences, including sea-level rise, ocean acidification, coral die-offs, shifting global circulation currents and a rise in intense tropical cyclones.

“During the winter, the Southern Ocean was a carbon source — which threw the entire carbon budget into disarray,” Richard Jenkins says. “Where is that 30 percent of carbon emissions going? No one has an answer for that, which is a phenomenally poor understanding of our planetary systems. Our goal is to get enough data to get the models to reduce the margin of error so that everyone can agree on our trajectory.”

As another hurricane season approaches, much of the U.S. coast remains unprepared. Flood insurance for millions of Americans living near the ocean is still optional. Some federal disaster loans to rebuild after a storm are contingent on credit; consumer-protection laws do not rein in corrupt contractors who flock to disaster areas; and many state governments lack the funds and staffing necessary to manage recovery.

Eighteen years after Hurricane Katrina rolled over the clapboard shacks and corner stores of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, the population is still around 30 percent of what it was in 2000 — with only a handful of businesses to serve residents. Communities in the nine states that experienced Hurricane Ida’s torrential wind and rain in 2021 are still rebuilding, and parts of Long Island, Staten Island and New Jersey are still recovering from Superstorm Sandy 11 years later — all while New York City repeatedly delayed and rewrote its plans to fortify and protect Lower Manhattan from another direct hit.

On the streets of Fort Myers, Fla., where Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 storm, killed more than 150 people and caused an estimated $112.9 billion in damages in September , many residents remain displaced, and even more are still waiting on insurance checks. Full recovery could take up to a decade, disaster experts say, assuming another storm does not hit before then.

What worries tropical-cyclone modelers like Hiro Murakami, a project scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., are regions with little to no experience with major storms being drawn into tropical-cyclone territory. Warming water off the coast of Europe over the last 20 years has opened the door to storms like ex-Hurricane Ophelia in 2017, which grazed Ireland with gusts up to 119 m.p.h. The next year, Hurricane Helene followed a rare path, traveling north from Africa, instead of west, eventually affecting the United Kingdom. Other regions being drawn into cyclone territory include India’s west coast, eastern Japan, Hawaii and the sprawling agrarian-industrial coastline that wraps around northeastern China.

Storms are even hitting the Middle East with more power, Murakami says, like Cyclone Shaheen in 2021. The storm took a remarkable path from the Bay of Bengal across India and the Arabian Sea and made landfall in Oman as a severe cyclone, the first one there in recorded history. “They have no experience with it,” Murakami says. “No dikes. No defenses.”

Another concern is the overall rise of extreme weather. Just look at 2022: Extreme rainstorms flooded the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro; low rainfall in Iraq resulted in a huge dust storm that shut down most of the country; heat waves in India and Pakistan brought temperatures topping 120 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, followed by exceptionally rainy monsoon seasons; and freak tornadoes tore through New Orleans. The opening months of 2023 had a parade of atmospheric rivers — made wetter and more intense by climate change — dump more than 30 trillion gallons of water on California.

Gore-Tex-clad meteorologists clinging to seaside piers have popularized a vibrant vocabulary for our new meteorological reality: bombogenesis, polar vortex, vapor storm, wave overtopping, sting jets, megadroughts. It is a dangerous game relating all weather disasters to climate change, but when one considers the complex and interrelated nature of climate and weather systems on Earth, there’s no denying that they must be linked to some degree. Adding an estimated 0.7 watts of heat to every square meter of land and water on the planet is influencing pretty much everything in the ocean and sky, even the poofy thunderheads that glide over your backyard on a summer afternoon.

Such are the perils of disturbing the equilibrium that Earth has maintained for millions of years, Murakami says. With average atmospheric CO2 content topping 417 parts per million for the first time in more than four million years, he points out another often overlooked and underreported fact: If we stopped burning fossil fuels today, additional warming would begin to flatten within a few years, as would the escalation of tropical-cyclone intensity.

“If we can successfully constrain emissions in the middle of the 21st century, and CO2 emissions decrease afterward, hurricane activity will also go back to present-day,” he says. “Cyclone activity largely follows the path of CO2 levels.”

Colorado State University released its annual hurricane outlook in April, anticipating 13 named storms, six hurricanes and two major hurricanes in 2023. Foltz and Saildrone were already preparing a new fleet of drones. The plan was to match them with aerial drones launched from Hurricane Hunter aircraft and subsea gliders so researchers could analyze the architecture of a storm from hundreds of feet beneath the ocean’s surface to thousands of feet above it.

Foltz will watch their progress from his office in NOAA’s A.O.M.L. lab. It will most likely take each drone a month to navigate into position and then a few weeks to coordinate with the gliders and aerial drones. Then Foltz, Jenkins and a crew of NOAA scientists across the nation will wait patiently — watching the skies, monitoring the Atlantic’s ever-warming temperature and waiting for a line of thunderheads to be hooked and whirled into a perfect storm.

Porter Fox is a writer in New York and the author of a forthcoming book from Little, Brown and Company, “The Great River of the Sea,” which is based on reporting from this article.

Wesley Allsbrook is an illustrator known for bold movement, saturated palettes and a strong sense of narrative in their art.

Explore Our Weather Coverage

Extreme Weather Maps: Track the possibility of extreme weather in the places that are important to you .

Heat Safety: Extreme heat is becoming increasingly common across the globe. We asked experts for guidance on how to stay cool .

Hurricane Preparation: When a storm is approaching, you may not have much time before you must head for safer ground. Here are some tips for getting ready .

Tornado Alerts: A tornado warning demands instant action. Here’s what to do if one comes your way .

Flash Flooding: Fast rising water can be deadly. Here’s what to do if you’re caught off guard , and how to prepare for a future flooding event.

Evacuating Pets: When disaster strikes, household pets’ lives are among the most vulnerable. You can avoid the worst by planning ahead .

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Surviving a hurricane in a sailboat: Essential things to do

In this article, I am going to explain to you what all the things you need to do for protecting yourself and your sailboat in a hurricane. Although surviving a hurricane is not that simple, but you can follow some steps to protect yourself during a hurricane in the sailboat.

Choose an area near the shore for anchoring your boat. Try to choose an area surrounded by mountains (mountains will try to decrease the wind speed). After anchoring, keep all your belongings inside the boat. During the hurricane, you just need to check the boat condition regularly.

During a hurricane, winds can exceed 100 mph and tornadoes are often associated with these storms. Mostly, try to avoid being on the boat during the hurricane.

In the center of the hurricane, the wind speed will be high compared to the outer area of the hurricane, where the wind speed will be less. Whenever you hear about the hurricane, sail away from the hurricane area if possible. If that option is not possible, then do follow these steps to defend yourself and your boat from a hurricane.

Everything has parts to deal with, in the first part you need to prepare for a hurricane, in the second part you might not have much work to do, in the third part you need to do post-hurricane work.

Preparing for the hurricane

Before doing all the pre-hurricane work, check whether you have enough resources like food, water, etc. If you don’t have them, try to get them. Check whether all the communication devices are fully charged or not and working or not? Communication plays a major role during the hurricane.

While preparing your boat for the hurricane, there are some steps everyone needs to follow to secure your boat from the hurricane winds. These are the following steps.

• Finding a perfect area for anchoring your sailboat
• Anchoring your sailboat in a hurricane
• Keep your objects inside the sailboat during a hurricane

1. Finding a perfect area for anchoring your sailboat

The first essential thing you should do while preparing for a hurricane survival in a sailboat is to find a good area for anchoring your boat. And try to find the area that is close to the shore, not too far from the shore.

While searching for the area, you should consider the surroundings too. You can’t survive a hurricane on your own you need to take some help from nature. Check for these kinds of places that I mentioned on the list.

While selecting the area for anchoring your boat, be careful to check whether you are entering any other country’s waters.

• Check for the area that is surrounded by mountains
• Move away from the neighbor boats around you(if any)
• Check the depth of the water

1. Check for the area that is surrounded by mountains (cove)

• The hurricane survival depends on the area you selected for anchoring your boat. Try to look for an area that is surrounded by mountains or hills. The mountains will help in decreasing wind speed.
• If the boat is surrounded by mountains, the mountains will decrease the wind speed by half. The mountains will act as a barrier in protecting your boat by blocking most of the winds caused by the hurricane.

2. Move away from the neighbor boats around you (if any)

• If there are any other sailboats anchored near you, you should be careful. Have some extra dock bumpers attached to your boat. If your neighbor boat starts swinging, your boat is sitting beside to get a hit form them.
• If there are any other boats around you, try to maintain enough distance between your boat and their boat. So, there is enough space for anchoring safely.
• If there are so many boats near your boat, then tie some dock bumpers around your boat. Just in if case any other boat swings or came close to your boat. The dock guards will help you to avoid the damage.

3. Check the depth of the water

• Don’t forget to check the depth of the water, because the whole anchoring process depends on the water depth. Make sure that the depth is not too high or low.

2. Anchoring your boat in a hurricane

After finding the area for anchoring your boat. Anchor your boat with 1 or 2 anchors to avoid the swing.

Now you need to do the essential step for hurricane survival that is anchoring your boat. Since you are facing a hurricane, you need to increase your anchor scope from normal 5:1 to 7:1 or 8:1 or more, depending on the hurricane strength.

Anchor as though you plan to stay for weeks, even if you intend to leave in an hour. Lee Allred

Achor scope refers to how much longer rope or chain you need to use for anchoring your boat. If it is 5:1 anchor scope, then for every 1-meter depth in the water, you should use 5-meters long length rope or chain for anchoring your boat.

Check my article on Choosing a perfect anchor for your boat (don’t worry, it will open in a new tab). In that article, I mentioned all the things you need to consider while buying an anchor for your boat based on the bottom types.

While anchoring your boat in a hurricane, follow these steps

• Check the surroundings
• Use hurricane anchor for anchoring in hurricanes
• If possible, use extra anchors to avoid the swing of the boat

1. Check the surroundings

• While anchoring your boat, make sure that your boat is far away from other boats or ophiolite (An ophiolite is a sequence of rocks that appears to represent a section through the oceanic crust) in the sea.
• Sometimes the boat will swing around the single point (the main anchor) if you are using only one anchor. During the swing, if there are any boats or ophiolite near your boat, you may get hit them with your boat.
• Which might damage your boat. So, try to maintain some distance between them.

2. Use hurricane anchor for anchoring in hurricanes

• Don’t use the same anchor all the time for anchoring your boat. Dedicate one anchor for hurricanes and one for everyday use.
• Try to maintain a separate anchor (strong anchors like Mantus, Manson Supreme, Rocna, etc) for anchoring during a hurricane, and use a normal (small) anchor for general anchoring a boat. It is good to maintain a separate anchor for different needs.
• While buying the anchor, buy an anchor that you can dismantle the anchor into separate parts. So, you can carry big anchors in the boat.

3. If possible, use extra anchors to avoid the swing of the boat

• Use extra anchors to avoid swing around a single point (single anchor). If you anchored your sailboat with a single anchor, it might swing around the point if the wind speed increases or changes the direction.
• To prevent that swing around a single anchor, use an extra 1 or 2 anchors for holding the boat strongly.
• Mostly 2 anchors are sufficient, no need to use 3 anchors.

3. Keep your objects inside the boat during a hurricane

After anchoring your boat, 50% of the work is done. Now, it’s time to pack all the objects which are outside the boat and keep them inside the boat.

Now in this step, you need to do only one thing, just pack the necessary belongings and keep it inside the boat. While doing this step, don’t pack unnecessary belongings and dump them inside the boat, because again you should unpack them after the hurricane. Then you will face difficulty.

Follow these basic steps to do that.

• Keep your belongings which are inside the boat safely
• Then keep the belongings inside, which are outside the boat

1. Keep your belongings which are inside the boat safely

• Before packing up all the outside belongings, and keeping them inside the boat, make sure that the belongings inside the boat are properly packed.
• Keep them inside the cupboard or somewhere to avoid falling off when the boat moves up and down in the waves. Avoid keeping anything in an open cupboard during the hurricane.
• If you have an open cupboard, then remove your belongings from the open cupboard and keep them somewhere else or on the floor.
• They might fall from the cupboard on your body or somewhere else in the boat due to the big waves.

2. Then keep the belongings inside, which are outside the boat

• First, remove the objects that will fly off the boat due to the wind. Like a dinghy, jib sail, and mainsail, etc. So, that nothing will fly off from the boat.
• So pack the belongings which are valuable and keep them inside. The first thing you should do is pack the mainsail and jib sail. This is the second most important thing you should do after anchoring your boat.
• If you are having a big boat, the mainsail will be heavy, and it’s hard to remove by a single person. In that case, just take the mainsail off and tie it to the boom itself.
• And try to remove solar panels, if you have any. Keep them inside the boat if possible, else, tie them outside the boat with extra protection. If the wind speed is around or less than 70 mph, then it is fine to leave them on the boat itself.

You can eliminate all the fears by eliminating all the dangers. Dangers like anchor failure, boat drag, etc. If you can eliminate all these things, then you can be safe inside a boat.

Waves are not measured in feet or inches, they are measured in increments of fear. Buzzy Trent

After packing everything and keeping them inside the boat, now there is nothing more to do. You just need to wait until the hurricane passes away.

Things to do during a hurricane in a sailboat

Now comes the essential part. During a hurricane, stay inside the boat, and stay calm. Most of the time, you should check the boat conditions and act accordingly. Checking the boat regularly during the hurricane is very crucial.

Eat a limited amount of food during a hurricane and try to use less power during the hurricane, because you might not know how long the hurricane will last.

Follow these steps to ensure that your boat is doing well or not?

• Bilge pump checking
• Mainsail checking
• Checking the neighbor boats(if any)

1. Bilge pump checking

• During the hurricanes, however, you locked the doors the water can come inside the boat. So, you should pump them out with the bilge pump.
• Ensure whether your bilge pump is working properly or not, because they often fail. The boat can sink in the water if the bilge pump is not working properly.
• Sometimes, the bilge pump might stop working due to any disturbances outside due to hurricanes. If you are using a manual bilge pump, then it is fine because every time you will check the water level, and you will turn on the pump switch.
• If you using an automatic one, which will detect the water level and automatically turn on the bilge pump switch, to pump the water out.
• The problem with this automatic water detection is it fails so many times. It may fail due to many reasons
• So, every time don’t forget to check the water level in the bilge and don’t forget about the water level detector too.

2. Mainsail checking

• If you already kept the mainsail in the boat, then there is no need to check. You need to check the mainsail if you tied it to the boom and kept it outside the boat
• Tie the mainsail to the boom strongly so that it won’t come out or fly off in the air.

3.Checking the neighbor boats (if there is any boat near you)

• If there are no boats near you, then no need to worry about this.
• If there are any sailboats anchored near you, you should be careful. Have some extra dock bumpers attached to your boat. If your neighbor boat starts swinging, your boat is sitting beside to get a hit form them.
• If there are so many boats near your boat, then tie some dock bumpers around your boat. If in case any other boat swings or came close to your boat. The dock guards will help you to avoid the damage.

Post-hurricane work in a sailboat

• The worst part of the hurricane is over. Now you need to put all the things back on the boat and start the journey.
• Now you need to check the boat and clean the boat if there is any waste on the boat. Then place the solar panels back on the boat to get power.
• After that, remove the anchor and put on your mainsail and jib sail back.

That’s it, you have successfully defeated the hurricane, and now it is time to start your journey. Check this cool video on how to prepare your boat for a hurricane? She explained it very well.

Bottom line

The essential thing for sailing is to practice all the things in advance. You should be aware of what to do during a hurricane, harsh weather, etc. You should have one hurricane plan, and you should practice it regularly.

The essential work you should do when you heard about the hurricane is to move away from the hurricane area, if possible. No matter what, just sail away from the area for 50 km or 100 km. That is the best way to protect yourself and your boat from a hurricane.

Sometimes you might be stuck at someplace, in the sea, it can be due to any reason (engine failure or mainsail damage or something else), during that time, you cant sail the boat, then you need to implement the hurricane survival plan.

If you are in the middle of the hurricane, then it is very hard for survival. The wind speed will be so high, like around 200 mph. At that speed, you can’t control the boat.

So finally, follow some apps or websites like the windy app or AccuWeather website or some other websites for the broadcasting news.

Check my article on Safety tips for boating: A detailed guide (don’t worry, it will open in new tab). In that article, I mentioned all the safety tips for boating in detail.

Related questions

1. What essential things do you need to sail around the world?

There are some essential things you need to have with you, while you are sailing around the world on a sailboat.

• An International Certificate of Competence (ICC) certificate
• A good sailboat (that can withstand extreme weathers)
• Source of passive income
• Passport and visa

If you are interested in that, then check my article on Without these, you can’t sail around the world (don’t worry, it will open in new tab)

2. What is the ideal kind boat to sail around the world?

The best kind of boat for sailing around the world would be Sailboat or yacht.

My name is Mahidhar, and I am passionate about boating. Every day I learn some new things about boats and share them here on the site.

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Hurricane beryl caused at least 22 houston-area deaths, with more than half power outage-related.

The local death toll from the July 8 storm could continue to climb as medical examiner’s offices continue to investigate.

Hurricane Beryl has caused at least 22 deaths in the Houston area, and widespread power outages during and after the July 8 storm contributed to more than half of those fatalities.

More than 2.2 million homes, schools and businesses – representing about 80% of the electricity customers served by CenterPoint Energy – lost power at the peak of the Category 1 hurricane that was particularly damaging because it passed almost directly over Houston . Hundreds of thousands remained without electricity more than a week afterward, and there still were about 10,000 outages as of Thursday afternoon.

Six of the 13 storm-related deaths in Houston and Harris County were caused by heat exposure tied to a power outage, according to information released by the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences . Electricity losses also contributed to all five of the confirmed, hurricane-related deaths in Galveston County, its medical examiner’s office said this week.

In Matagorda County, where the hurricane made landfall before proceeding north through Houston, a 60-year-old Bay City man who was bed-ridden and paralyzed from the waist down died from heatstroke on the evening of July 8, in a home that lost power, according to county spokesperson Mitch Thames.

"It's tragic," Thames said. "Our hearts and prayers go out to the family."

RELATED: Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick fronts special senate committee after CenterPoint’s lackluster Beryl response

The Houston-area death toll from Beryl – which according to the Associated Press killed at least 11 people in the Caribbean before swirling its way through the Gulf of Mexico and into Texas – could continue to climb in the aftermath of the storm.

Scott Yao, a spokesperson for the Fort Bend County Medical Examiner's Office, said Thursday that no storm-related deaths there had been confirmed – yet. The eye of the storm passed over the county, which is southwest of Houston.

"There might be some, but we're still gathering information right now," Yao said.

Three of the storm victims in Harris County drowned, with two Houston men, including Houston Police Department employee Russell Richardson, getting caught in vehicles that were submerged by floodwaters. Two other Harris County residents were killed by fallen trees on the day of the hurricane, and two Houston men died in the days that followed when they fell while trimming damaged trees.

All three of the storm-related deaths that have been confirmed in Montgomery County, which is north of Houston, were caused by fallen trees on July 8, according to Judge Wayne Mack, the Justice of the Peace for Precinct 1. Two of the victims were apparently homeless and inside a tent in Magnolia, Mack said, and another man who died was struck by a falling oak tree while riding his tractor in the eastern part of the county.

RELATED: Some Houston ISD campuses damaged by Hurricane Beryl might not be ready for start of school year

Mack said Richard Ross, 41, was on his way home after using his tractor to help clear a nearby road.

"He was being a good Samaritan," Mack said. "He was helping neighbors clear trees from the roadway so EMS and fire could get through. The storm wasn't quite over."

Ross was the youngest hurricane victim in the Houston area, according to local authorities. The other 21 people were age 50 or older, and 15 of the victims were in their 60s or 70s.

Below is a list of the 22 storm-related deaths that have been confirmed by Houston-area authorities:

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Surviving 24 Hours in Hurricane Julio on a Sinking Sailboat

The floundering Walkabout lost its mast, one of its hatches and its life raft.

— -- Three men who sailed into the eye of Hurricane Julio had to watch three rescue attempts turn away as their sinking boat was battered for 24 hours by towering waves and hurricane force winds.

Waves that rose 30 feet high had dismasted the sailboat and ripped away one of its hatches, allowing wave after wave to fill the boat. Winds that reached speeds of 115 mph tore away the vessel's life raft. The boat wallowed in the troughs as waves slammed into it.

“It was very intense,” Ben Nealy told ABC News affiliate KITV in Honolulu just hours after being rescued. “We were probably pretty close to the eye at the time we got stowed in.”

Nealy, 61, was en route from Stockton, California, to Honolulu along with his son Lee Nealy, 22, and Mike Vanway, 22, when their 42-foot sailboat the Walkabout began to take on water, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. The three men were 414 miles northeast of Oahu.

The distress call from the sailors came in at 7:15 a.m. on Sunday.

“We were being drawn along the storm,” Nealy told KITV. “The storm was passing, and it was also sucking us with it, so we weren’t getting out of it nearly as quick as I had hoped...We finally just ended up in front of it.”

The Joint Rescue Coordination Center in Honolulu sent an airplane from the National Hurricane Center to locate and make contact with the stranded sailors. At 10:49 a.m., the air crew could hear the Mayday calls from the boat.

With Hurricane Julio in full force, winds roared at 92 to 115 mph and 30-foot waves had taken on a toll on the sailboat. One of the hatches had been ripped away and the boat was rapidly flooding. The life-raft had also been blown overboard.

“You’ve got white caps that are blown vertical,” Neely told KITV. “The white water will break, and instead of having it fall into the water, it goes horizontal.”

“Visibility is very limited and it looks like snow on the water,” Neely said. “It kind of looks like the perfect storm.”

An aircrew launched at 11:10 a.m. to deliver a life raft and pumping equipment, but the fierce winds blew it off into the sea. The aircrew was forced to return to base due to a shortage of fuel.

Hours later, at 5:15 p.m., another aircrew attempted to deliver the survival supplies, but severe conditions once again thwarted any attempts at assisting the three stranded men.

“We were dealing with an 800 foot ceiling,” Lt. Mike Koeher, the Aircraft Commander of the second rescue plane, told ABC News. “The winds were between 30 and 40 knots it was getting pretty dark.”

“By the time we got on scene, the sailboat captain, [Ben Nealy], said they had about 300 gallons of sea water on board,” said Kohler.

With the second rescue aircraft still flying over the stranded vessel, the Coast Guard directed a container ship named the Manukai that was in the area to heard towards Nealy's boat. The ship found the floundering sailboat at 10 p.m.

"We arrived on scene, the situation was dire. It was far from ideal conditions," 1st Capt. John Bloomingdale told ABC News affiliate KITV.

Attempts to bring the men aboard were considered to dangerous to try in the dark and still stormy seas.

“They tried to get us aboard, but it was too dangerous. Visibility was really down,” Ben Nealy told KITV. “So, we called it off at about midnight and they sat there all night long using their fuel, and their time, and their equipment to wait until they could take us aboard in the morning."

Finally, at 7:52 a.m. on Monday, a 661-foot rescue ship pulled alongside the battered sailboat, reeling it in and dropping a ladder to the three men, who had finally been saved.

The three men had been successfully rescued after more than 24 hours stranded at sea, with no serious injuries reported.

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WATCH: Cruise Passengers Share Terrifying Videos from 'Nightmare' Storm at Sea

The Carnival Sunshine cruise ship made it back to port safely on Saturday after being stuck in a storm between the Bahamas and Charleston, S.C. for 15 hours

The Carnival Sunshine cruise ship made it back to port nine hours later than planned after sailing through a terrifying storm on Friday night.

The ship was on its way to Charleston, S.C. from the Bahamas when it got caught in severe weather, including nearly 80 mph winds. Passengers on board shared details and footage of the chaos and destruction caused by the storm on social media. Thankfully, Carnival told PEOPLE in a statement provided below that "no one was seriously injured."

Crew Center, a cruise ship information site, posted a video on Twitter showing a flooded hallway, torn-off doors and other debris and destruction on board.

"The aftermath aboard Carnival Sunshine after a severe storm," the post read. "The crew from Deck 0-4 evacuated to the theater, and anywhere they could rest… the crew bar destroyed."

brad morrell/storyful

Passenger Daniel Taylor told Newsweek that the captain made an announcement around 4:45 p.m. saying that they would be experiencing a delay due to "adverse weather conditions," expressing that they "would do everything they could to minimize discomfort.

By dinner time, public decks had been closed off, and plates and cups were flying off the buffet areas, he recalled.

By the early hours of Saturday morning, he said, "We were no longer able to see where we were going, how fast we were going, what the wind speed was, or anything. We were blind to what was going on." Swells were hitting the ship "over and over," said Taylor, who also recalled seeing crew members wearing life vests.

At that point, the internet was also out, so those on board couldn't get any additional information or reach loved ones.

Matthew Branham, who was also on board, told The Washington Post , that "waves were hitting the boat so hard that it was like an earthquake experience, jarring you like a really rough roller coaster — even in the middle floor."

TVs were falling off walls and glasses shattering. “You could not stand up in your room,” he said. “You could be thrown from the bed."

Another passenger, RJ Whited, wrote in a since-deleted Facebook post cited by Newsweek , "Our cruise ship last night was literally sideways and slung everything in our room breaking, people in the hallways throwing up and sleeping on the stairs."

Added Whited, "We also found out that they knew about the storm and instead of us staying back to ride it out a few hours they hit it head-on so we could make it back for the other cruise to be on time."

Finally, the ship made it back to Charleston around 7:30 a.m., though it couldn't immediately dock due to continuing rough weather.

At 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, the ship was able to dock.

Summing up the "nightmare" experience, passenger Christa Seifert-Alicea told NBC News 4 : "What we endured is indescribable, not only to feel it yourself but to hear and see it set in on every single person around you from adult, child and the elderly is something I will never forget."

In a statement to PEOPLE on Wednesday, Carnival said: "Carnival Sunshine's return to Charleston was impacted by the weather and rough seas on Saturday. The weather's prolonged impact on the Charleston area delayed the ship's arrival and as a result, the next voyage's embarkation was also delayed. We appreciate the patience and understanding of all our guests." The statement claims that "the ship's crew followed our protocols for rough weather" noting, "thankfully, no one was seriously injured."

"The weather was unexpectedly strong, causing conditions that were rougher than forecasted," the statement continues. "Given the circumstances as they were, the ship's officers and our Fleet Operations Center team using real time meteorology data coordinated to keep the ship in its safest location. Attempting to sail out of the large front could have been dangerous. The ship proceeded to the port as soon as the weather began to clear." The cruise line's statement also said that the captain "made several announcements about the weather and the delay" but noted "some of the worst weather occurred in the overnight hours when announcements are not typically made."

The Carnival Sunshine is already on its next voyage, the cruise line confirmed.

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How to Moor your Sailboat for a Storm

• By Ed Eisenberger
• Updated: October 2, 2015

Hurricane experts are predicting an above average hurricane season in the Atlantic. As sailors, there’s nothing we can do to change the outcome of these predictions. But we can be prepared. Planning for the safety of your boat and where it will survive best is a lot like the real estate business: location, location, location. And learning how to moor a sailboat should should come well before the storm.

Where to keep your boat

A secure marina may not be the most hospitable location during a hurricane. There are several important considerations. Does the dockmaster have an established hurricane plan in place? If not, will you be required to evacuate? The physical characteristics of the marina, its surroundings as well as the layout, construction and design of piers and slips all play an important role in the safety of your boat. And despite your best planning efforts, your neighbor may not have been so diligent in his. Loose boats in a marina wreak havoc.

If you plan to keep your boat in a marina, you’ll need to consider your boat and slip design as well as the harbormaster’s configuration. Many marinas designate that alternate slips be vacated when a storm approaches. Others require complete evacuation.

Assess the condition of the marina docks. Are cleats firmly attached? Are the pilings solid? Can the physical condition of the docks, piers, pilings and cleats withstand the tremendous forces involved in hurricane conditions? Many years ago, a vicious low-pressure system carrying storm force winds swept through Sausalito, California, completely severing several finger piers from the main dock. The entire assembly, complete with boats, was swept intact into San Francisco Bay.

If your boat is to remain at a dock, you’ll need to devise a docking plan radically different from your normal arrangement. For most boats, consider pointing the bow toward open water if possible. If not, try to point the bow toward the least protected direction. Unlike boats at anchor or on a mooring, a boat lashed down in a marina cannot turn to face oncoming wind and waves, which may come from totally opposite directions during the course of the storm, radically redirecting the forces on a vessel.

The key to your docking plan should be long lines — the longer the better — to accommodate the predicted storm surge. A good rule of thumb: Storm lines should be at least as long as the boat itself.

Using longer lines will require using other boat owners’ pilings and cleats, and vice versa. Lines may have to be run across marina waterways to facing pilings or to anchors placed in channels. That requires extra planning with other boat owners and marina management. By the time you’ve completed docking your boat, it should resemble a spider in the center of a web.

Your efforts should prevent your boat from moving laterally and at the same time allow it to rise and fall during storm surge. Storm surge may raise your boat completely above adjacent pilings. If your boat isn’t held securely in place, it may be impaled when the surge recedes. Make sure the dock lines cannot slip off the tops of the pilings.

Severe storm surge may completely submerge docks, pilings and cleats. Floating docks present a different set of problems. Storm surge may lift them high enough to slip off their pilings and float away. Many marinas are protected by breakwaters or jetties. They may be totally submerged by storm surge, exposing your normally secure marina to increased fetch, open ocean surge and high waves.

Canals, rivers and waterways are usually better alternatives to marinas, although many of the same problems exist. And each requires a different approach. In canals, try to secure your boat in the center, tying the boat to both sides using the spiderweb technique. Move as far up the canal as possible; the boat will be better protected from storm surge and you reduce the possibility of blocking access to other boats. In wider canals and waterways, secure your boat to anything available: trees, secure pilings and anchors. The more lines and anchors, the better. Again, use lines as long as possible.

One successful technique involves using prebuilt chain and line assemblies. Secure one end of each assembly to a cleat, piling or tree on shore, the other to heavy shackles on one end of the chain. On the boat side of the chain, another shackle and heavy line attach to your boat’s deck cleats. This arrangement makes each line individually adjustable from the deck. Adjust the lines until each length of chain exerts an equal pull on the boat. This prevents the boat from being blown far enough in any direction to come in contact with other boats or objects on shore.

In a blow, the boat is forced to lift the chain. As the wind subsides, the chain settles back down, re-centering the boat. This arrangement also allows for significant amounts of storm surge while keeping the boat centered, because all chain assemblies must be lifted simultaneously. Additional weights (such as lead ingots, barbell weights, and so on) can be added to the catenary of the chain to increase its effectiveness.

Hurricane holes also offer an alternative to crowded marinas. In an ideal hurricane hole sturdy, tall trees and root lattices tend to protect the boat from high winds, in addition to providing excellent terminal points for dock lines and anchors.

Sturdy moorings in protected harbors are also a good alternative to crowded marinas or canals. A boat on a mooring can swing freely to face the wind, reducing windage, and it can’t be slammed into a dock unless the anchor(s) or mooring drags. Several questions arise: What constitutes a sturdy mooring, and will it hold in a hurricane? Other considerations in a harbor are the depth of water and the type of bottom. The proximity of other boats is also a concern.

Considerable testing of the holding power of anchors in all types of bottoms has been conducted by West Marine, BOAT/U.S., numerous anchor manufacturers and Cruising World . Most effective were the fluke-type anchors such as Bruce, CQR and Danforth, which bury themselves under load. Mushroom and dead-weight anchors drag with relatively little effort. A mushroom anchor that isn’t sufficiently buried has almost no holding power. During the “Storm Of The Century” in March 1993, which pushed 90-knot winds through my anchorage in Key Largo, Florida, a 40-foot yawl dragged a 10′ x 10′ x 12″-thick slab of concrete 75 yards.

One particularly effective arrangement is to use three burying-type storm anchors with chain rodes, deployed 120 degrees apart and connected together using a heavy swivel. This mooring arrangement was one of the few that held during Hurricane Bob’s onslaught.

In all mooring and anchoring arrangements, remember to increase scope to allow for storm surge — 10:1 if possible. Use heavy, oversized chain and oversized line in an approximate 50/50 ratio for the bow line. If you are using all-chain rode, use a sturdy snubber approximately 1/10 the length of the rode. The addition of a sentinel (riding weight) to the rode will lower the angle of pull on the anchor and reduce jerking and strain on the boat. Remember that additional scope requires additional swinging room.

Depth and bottom type must also be considered. Normal depths may be altered radically during the approach or departure of a storm. Allow enough scope for storm surge. Conversely, if depths are minimal, your boat may go aground if the wind blows the water out of the harbor. Are there rocks? Your boat may survive the storm only to be torn apart as the storm recedes.

Test the holding ground. Anchor pull tests show that the best holding grounds are hard sand, soft sand, clay, mud, shells and soft mud, roughly in that order. Note that burying-type anchors in an ideal bottom may be impossible to retrieve after a storm.

There is one additional alternative: storing your boat ashore. A study by MIT after Hurricane Gloria found that boats stored ashore were far less likely to sustain damage than those kept in the water. For many boat owners, hauling their boat is the foundation of their hurricane plan.

Boats stored ashore should be well above the anticipated storm surge levels, which is sometimes difficult because most marinas and yards are at or near existing water levels. The same study, however, stated that boats tipped off their jack stands during a storm surge still suffered less damage than their waterborne counterparts.

If you haul your boat, make sure the boat has extra jack stands. Add a layer of plywood between the jack stand pad and the hull to distribute the weight. Chain the stands together. Some smaller sailboats can be laid on their sides to eliminate the risk of being blown or floated off their stands.

How to secure your boat

No matter where you’ve decided to keep your boat — in a marina, at a dock, in a canal, hurricane hole or on a mooring, there are several additional points to consider: chafe, cleats and chocks, and windage. Hurricane-force winds exert tremendous strains on boat’s hardware.

Wind force, and the damage it causes, increases exponentially. A doubling of wind speed increases the force on your boat four times. For example, a 20-knot wind exerts a force of 1.3 pounds per square foot; doubling the speed to 40 knots quadruples the pressure to 5.2 pounds per square foot.

Chafe protectors are essential on all lines, wherever you keep your boat. Unprotected lines will chafe and sever within minutes under the rigorous conditions of a hurricane. Boats on a mooring are particularly vulnerable because the boat is usually held in place using only two pennants; the enormous forces generated are concentrated on only two lines.

Depending on your boat, wave surge may increase loading by 1.5 times the values shown. These same forces are transmitted to the mooring; make sure all eye splices have thimbles to reduce wear at the attachment point on the mooring.

Nylon line is well known for its ability to stretch under loads. Under severe loading, however, friction from stretching increases the internal temperature of the line to the point of meltdown. Heat from increased chafe accelerates the wearing process. Normal chafing gear is totally inadequate under hurricane conditions. Chafe protectors must be strong and longer. Remember, you’ll be using longer lines, increasing the percentage of stretch over a given distance. You can make your own protectors using heavy canvas (rubber or neoprene hose may cause trapped heat to melt line). If your chocks will accommodate two layers, add a second layer over the first. Heavy-duty canvas can be purchased through industrial vendors. Check with your local fire department — they sometimes discard used fire hose, which can be fabricated into high-quality, low-wearing chafe protectors.

Secure the chafe protectors to the docking lines. Canvas protectors can be sewn or tied to the line in a similar fashion.

Lines should also be larger in diameter to resist chafe and excessive stretching. Generally you should use 1/2-inch line on boats up to 25 feet, 5/8-inch line for boats 25 to 34 feet and 3/4 to one-inch line for larger boats. Double up on critical lines. Use chafe gear wherever the line comes in contact with anything such as chocks, pulpits, pilings or trees.

Longer, larger and more numerous lines will require larger cleats and chocks. In addition, the extra forces exerted during a hurricane will require stronger attachments of the cleats to the deck. Determine the size of lines you’ll be using and, if necessary, add bigger cleats to accommodate them.

Beef up your dock cleats by adding backing plates if your boat doesn’t already have them — unbacked cleats may pull out of the deck under heavy loads. Use stainless steel plates. Make sure you use the largest size screws that will fit through the mounting holes in the cleats. Use cleats with four mounting holes for added strength. Don’t overload a single cleat — two lines per cleat should be the maximum. If your docking plan calls for more lines than there are cleats available, install additional cleats. Check windlass mounting points as well. The windlass should be mounted solidly with appropriately sized hardware and backing plates.

Boats with keel-stepped masts can also use the mast as a line termination point. Don’t run a line attached to your mast through a deck chock — the extra line length between the mast base and the chock will allow excessive stretch between the two points, increasing chafe at the chock.

Reducing windage

Remove everything to reduce wind resistance: Biminis, antennas, deck-stowed anchors, sails, running rigging, booms, life rings, dinghies and so on. Besides reducing windage, you eliminate the probability of these items being damaged or blown away.

Remove furling headsails. Even when furled, they offer a sizable amount of wind resistance and additional load on the headstay. And despite your best attempts to secure properly the furling line, the ravages of hurricane force winds most likely will unravel your efforts, allowing the sail to unfurl during the storm with disastrous consequences.

Arrange your halyards to reduce flogging and damage, both to the fittings on the halyard and to the objects in their path. One method to eliminate halyard slapping and windage is to tie all halyards off to a common messenger line and run the halyards to the top of the mast, reducing the number of lines exposed to the wind from as many as three or four to only one. Tie the messenger off on a rail.

Preventing water damage

Rain during a hurricane flies in every direction including up. Remove all cowl ventilators and replace with closure plates or tape off the vents using duct tape. Make sure Dorade box and cockpit drains are clear of debris. Close all seacocks except those used for drainage. Put bung plugs in unused thru-hulls and one in the exhaust to prevent water from flooding your engine. Deck drains and pump discharges located near the waterline can back flow when wind and waves put drains underwater.

Use duct tape and precut plywood panels to cover exposed instruments. Examine all hatches, ports, coaming compartments and sea lockers for leaks. Use duct tape to seal them off. Make sure that all papers (magazines, books, catalogs) are high enough in the boat to prevent them from getting wet if the cabin is flooded. Wet paper can turn into a pulpy mush, clogging bilge pumps. Prepare two lists: one listing all items to be removed from the boat prior to moving it to where it will ride out the hurricane and another listing all equipment needed to prepare your boat for the blow.

Electronics are particularly susceptible to water damage; if they can be removed from the boat quickly, add them to the list, along with clothing and other personal effects. Other items that should be removed include: outboard engines, portable fuel tanks, propane tanks, important ship’s papers and personal papers, as well as any other essential personal effects.

What to bring aboard

The list of items to be taken aboard include everything you’ve assembled beforehand to prepare your boat. Many times, the extra “hurricane only” items will be stored ashore — a well-organized list ensures nothing is missed when the hurricane package is taken aboard: extra lines, chafing gear, fenders, anchors, swivels, shackles, duct tape, bung plugs — all the items identified during your planning session. Include a dinghy or some other method for getting ashore after you’ve secured your boat.

Make sure your batteries are fully charged. If needed, take additional batteries aboard to boost available capacity.

Moving your boat before a storm

If you’re planning to move your boat prior to a hurricane, take the boat there on a trial run, noting how long it takes as well as any problems you might encounter under actual emergency conditions. Are there any bridges? Many communities require drawbridges to be “locked down” when a hurricane watch is issued. During Hurricane Andrew, many boat owners were prevented from moving their boats to more protected locations because bridges were locked down.

If you plan on moving a trailerable boat out of the hurricane area, get out early. Many communities prohibit cars with trailers on the road after issuing a hurricane watch. Before the season arrives, inspect your trailer for defects and fix them.

During your test run, make a diagram of how your mooring/docking lines will be arranged. Note any additional equipment you’ll need to secure your boat and add it to the list.

Time is of the essence

Many of the above items will require a substantial amount of time to complete, considerably more than can be accomplished when a hurricane threatens your area. Chandleries will run out of gear quickly when a hurricane looms. After developing your survival plan, purchase and assemble the gear you need to implement it.

Finally, leave early! Waiting to take action until a storm’s imminent arrival is inviting disaster. A hurricane warning is issued when sustained winds exceeding 64 knots are expected within 24 hours. Hurricane-proofing your house or evacuating the area will take precedence over boat safety. Winds may rise quickly. Securing a boat in 35-knot winds is extremely difficult; it’s impossible in 45-knot winds.

A hurricane watch is issued when hurricane conditions pose a threat to a specific coastal area within 36 hours. Drawbridges may be locked down after a watch is issued. You may find your secluded hurricane hole or protected canal inaccessible or already filled with boats.

Start moving as soon as you feel a hurricane watch is probable. Don’t rely on emergency services for assistance. Many harbor and marine patrols remove their vessels from the water or sequester them prior to the onset of storm and hurricane force winds.

After you’ve secured your boat, double-check everything. Turn off all electrical power except the bilge pumps. Test bilge pump switches and pump intakes for debris.

Don’t stay on your boat! Fifty percent of all hurricane-related deaths occur from boat owners trying to secure their boats in deteriorating conditions. Develop a well-thought-out hurricane plan, be prepared to implement it in the shortest possible time and, when completed, leave the boat to its own survival. There is absolutely nothing you can do when hurricane force winds are screaming across the deck.

It’s been decades since William Redfield’s serendipitous discovery of the rotary motion of tropical storms. And the cirrus clouds first observed by Father Benito Viñes still race across a clear, blue, tropical sky ahead of an approaching hurricane. His early warning system has been replaced by weather satellites and advanced computer forecasting systems. Scientists can now predict, with reasonable accuracy, the approximate number of tropical storms and hurricanes that will form in a given season. Watchful electronic eyes constantly beam down updates of their wanderings as they relentlessly gnaw and churn across their expansive ocean feeding grounds.

But the best efforts to predict the path or the intensity of a storm at a given moment still escapes even the best scientists and the most advanced computers. Vilhelm Bjerknes, an eminent meteorologist, accurately describes the physicist’s present attempts at hurricane forecasting: We are in a position of the physicist watching a pot of water coming to a boil. He knows intimately all the processes of energy transfer, molecular kinetics and thermodynamics involved. He can describe them, put them in the form of formulas and tell you a great deal about how much heat will boil how much water. Now ask him to predict precisely where the next bubble will form.

Related Books:

Complete Book Of Anchoring And Mooring , Second edition, by Earl Hinz

A Guide To Preparing Boats And Marinas For Hurricanes , free from BOAT/U.S.

Preparing Your Boat For A Hurricane , Sea Grant College of the State University of Florida

Ed Eisenberger is an independent marine electronics consultant and the electronics manager for West Marine in Key Largo, Florida. He lives aboard and sails his 41-foot ketch, Wandering Star, from which he keeps a close eye on the weather.

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What To Do When Sailing In A Storm

Last Updated by

Daniel Wade

June 15, 2022

Although it’s always advisable to avoid storms as much as possible, they are part of life at sea and sometimes you can’t avoid them. But when a storm comes your way, you should understand how to set up for the storm and how to deal with the worst.

You’ve probably asked yourself; what is it like to sail through a storm? Well, it can be the scariest thing to ever happen in your life. Sailing through a storm will test your strength, endurance, seamanship, and steering skills to the bitter limits. It can wreak serious havoc on your sailboat and any sailor, whether a beginner or experienced should know what to do in a storm when sailing.

Huge storms at sea are a requisite of fear and uncertainty. In most cases, it will sap morale, lead to poor decision making, make the crew members exhausted, and leave everyone in panic mode. Fortunately, it doesn’t need to. In addition to properly preparing the boat, you’ll require a well-thought-out strategy to deal with the sudden and unpredictable changes in weather. More importantly, you should make sure that everybody stays safe, remain calm, and work toward a common goal: overcoming the storm.

In this article, you’ll get to learn about what to do should storm come your way while out there on the water.

Table of contents

Check Your Boat before Sailing

Surviving a storm requires a great level of preparedness and it all begins long before setting out on a sail. As such, your chances of weathering a storm will increase if your boat is properly prepared to endure bad days on the water. A major part of controlling your boat and the crew in a heavy storm is being prepared for the worst. This means that you should have your boat properly rigged to easily access anything in short order.

Whether you can see a storm coming from far away or see it within seconds and on top of your head, the boat should be well prepared to deal with any condition. It’s fundamental to ensure that your lifelines are secure, the lines are strong and unworn, and all the emergency gear is on board and up to date. You should also update yourself on the weather on the days you’re planning to go out though it may be inaccurate.

Tactics for Sailing in Storm

The sailboat is, of course, stronger than people, which means that the main priority is to protect yourself, the crew, and the passengers. In addition to having enough life jackets and harness for everyone in the sailboat, you should take early action to avoid injuries and any form of seasickness as these can affect your safety.

You should also exercise situational awareness by watching your surroundings and monitoring the situation to determine whether the storm is decreasing or worsening. If the situation prolongs, it’s essential to ensure that everybody remains calm, keeps warm and takes time to eat and rest. In other words, this is the right time to show your man-management. Make sure that you maintain high spirits and that everybody works in tandem and are on the same wavelength. This will only work if you calmly work out a plan and communicate the plan to everyone.

Some of the best tactics to use in storm include sailing under storm jib, applying deeply reefed mainsail or applying storm trysail. These tactics will not only give you more control but will also give you more power to steer the boat in the waves. You can also run before the storm and try towing the drogue to slow down the boat.

Stay Away from the Shallows

The first thing that will come to your mind when a storm begins is to drop your sails, start the motor engine, and head off for the land. Well, this can be a very concrete plan as long as you can reach the harbor and dock the boat.

On the contrary, things can become worse if you get stuck in shallow waters. And even if you’re experienced, steering a boat out of the shallows is something else. This is because the winds can rapidly blow you onto the rocks and other obstructions, which can make it a lot more difficult. The engine will most likely die when you need it most.

For this reason, the best option is to stay in open water and use your skills to calmly ride out of the storm.

It’s important to start reefing as soon as you anticipate the storm. The idea here is that you shouldn’t have a lot of sails up in strong winds as this can make the sailboat to capsize. Again, it would be a lot easier to jib or furl the boat if the sails are up. Keep in mind that you should reef the sails when the wind is still manageable. As such, you should pay attention and monitor the winds at all times. Again, do not leave the cockpit if the winds are becoming stronger the boat is being tossed around.

Invest in Storm Sails

There are special sails that can be of great help in heavy winds. Although regular sails can be easily furled and still maintain shape and offer the required efficiency, a storm sail will make it much easier. It will enable you to continue sailing in a storm while reducing the effects of the heavy winds and the big waves.

Sailing in Storms

As we noted earlier, sailing in storms is a huge test of your experience, steering skill, and your overall seamanship. It’s, therefore, important to put your best foot forward and steer the boat effectively without panicking. For instance, you should refrain from sailing across tall breaking waves as they can easily capsize the boat. You should instead sail toward the flat spots while maintaining a high speed to steer out of the huge waves.

You should also target smooth waters if any to prevent the waves from washing across the deck. You can rig a preventer to hold the boom out while being extra careful not to broach the boat’s beam.

Honestly speaking, going through the storm can be a very miserable experience. The most important thing is to ensure that everybody in the body is safe and out of danger. In fact, do not risk your life to save the boat. Of course, your skills, experience, and willpower will be tested to the limits but you should remain calm and come up with a proper strategy that will help you steer the boat to safety. For instance, avoid shallow waters, reef as soon as possible, have storm sails. And make sure that everybody is reading from the same page. More importantly, avoid going out on the water if there’s an impending storm.

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I've personally had thousands of questions about sailing and sailboats over the years. As I learn and experience sailing, and the community, I share the answers that work and make sense to me, here on Life of Sailing.

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Adrift: History vs. Hollywood

When did the events depicted in the Adrift movie take place in real life?

In researching Tami Oldham and the Adrift true story, we discovered that the real-life events depicted in the 2018 movie spanned the months of September, October and November 1983. 23-year-old Tami Oldham and her British fiancé, Richard Sharp (34), had been pleasure sailing his 36-foot sailboat, the Mayaluga, for the previous six months. They made the decision to accept a job delivering a 44-foot yacht, the Hazana, from Tahiti to San Diego where it would be received by a new owner. They had been less than three weeks into their 4,000-mile trip when Hurricane Raymond hit. -Chicago Tribune Top: The real Tami Oldham and fiancé Richard Sharp prior to the trip.   Bottom: Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin as Oldham and Sharp in the Adrift 2018 movie.

Did they try to escape the hurricane?

Yes. Tami and Richard knew a storm was coming, but they didn't know it would be that bad. They tried to outrun Hurricane Raymond by sailing north, battling 140 knot winds and 40-foot waves as they did their best to keep the yacht afloat. The relentless category 4 hurricane showed no signs of calming. It changed direction and stayed on their tail like a predator. -Mirror Online

Did Tami Oldham's fiancé Richard Sharp survive the hurricane in real life?

No. In real life, as they continued to battle Hurricane Raymond on October 12, 1983, Richard Sharp sent his fiancée Tami below deck to rest. He used a safety line to tether himself to the yacht in an attempt to ride out the storm and keep the boat afloat. The yacht capsized and Tami hit her head when she was thrown against the cabin wall. The force of the blow knocked her out, and the last thing she can remember hearing was Sharp screaming, "Oh my God!" She didn't wake up for 27 hours, and when she did, she went above deck and discovered Richard's safety line hanging off the edge of the boat. Her fiancé was lost at sea. She would never see him again. -Chicago Tribune Tami Oldham remained unconscious for 27 hours after hitting her head when the boat capsized during the hurricane. The severe head injury is visible on Shailene Woodley's character in the 2018 movie. At first, the Adrift movie seems to unfold differently than the true story. Tami wakes up and finds an injured Richard floating in the water as he clings to a small overturned lifeboat that had fallen off the yacht. She gets him back to the yacht where she cares for his broken ribs and shattered leg as he reassures her that she can get them home, despite him describing himself as being "dead weight". However, paying close attention to the movie's trailer reveals a couple other clues to the likely reality of this situation. When Tami (Shailene Woodley) and Richard (Sam Claflin) are having dinner on his boat, he talks about the challenge of sailing and says that "you're either sleep deprived or seasick, and after a few days there's the hallucinations." This clue seems to foreshadow things to come. Coupled with Tami's bad head injury sustained during the storm, it's not hard to start wondering if Richard is merely a figment of Tami's imagination. Clues to this are also found in Tami's memoir Red Sky in Mourning . The Adrift movie's ending will undoubtedly reveal the answer. Tami's memoir , originally titled Red Sky in Mourning , provided the basis for the Adrift movie.

Did she hear a voice when she was stranded on the boat?

Yes. In her book Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea , she talks about hearing a voice, but not that of her lost-at-sea fiancé Richard Sharp. Instead, she described it as an "inner voice" that was audible to her externally three times. It's certainly possible that her head injury and blood loss caused her to believe that she was hearing such a voice. Others believe it was God speaking to her. "I needed guidance and the voice was a real phenomenon," says Tami. "Three times it was audible externally. I've asked the voice to come back, but I never heard from it again. ... The voice kept me on track. I just followed it." -Mirror Online

Was the yacht badly damaged like in the Adrift movie?

Yes. The Adrift  movie true story reveals that nearly everything on the Hazana (pictured below) was broken and strewn about. The masts had snapped off, and like in the 2018 movie, the sails were waterlogged and floated nearby. The cabin was half-filled with water. The engine and radio were broken. The radio device used to indicate the boat's emergency position was down as well, and the electronic navigation system wasn't functional either. -Mirror Online Top: The real Hazana yacht in 1983 after the ordeal at sea.   Bottom: Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin on the movie's version of the yacht. The biggest noticeable difference is the ladder placement.

How long was the real Tami Oldham adrift at sea?

Fact-checking the Adrift movie reveals that after Hurricane Raymond struck and claimed the life of her fiancé Richard Sharp, Tami Oldham remained stranded at sea on the damaged yacht for 41 days. -Mirror Online

How did Tami Oldham survive being stranded for a month and a half on the yacht?

In 2003, she told the Chicago Tribune that she ate canned food and peanut butter, consuming everything from fruit cocktail to sardines.

How did Tami manage to find her way to land?

With the yacht's navigation system broken by the storm, Tami used a sextant to help her find her way home. A sextant is a navigational instrument that can be used to measure the angle of the sun (or another astronomical object) above the horizon. "It saved my life," says Tami. She was then able to work out her latitude using nautical maps. To remember what got her home, Tami wears a triangular-shaped sextant pendant encrusted with a diamond. The only navigational instrument that wasn't broken during the hurricane was a sextant, which measures the angle of the sun (or other astronomical object) above the horizon. It saved her life. Being able to successfully navigate was only part of the challenge; she also needed to keep the yacht afloat and get it moving. She fashioned a pump to prevent the cabin down below from flooding and created a makeshift sail from a broken spinnaker pole and spare storm jib. She eventually managed to get the boat into a position where she could use currents that would hopefully take her to Hawaii. -Mirror Online

Did she stitch the wound on her head?

No. In the film, we see her using sutures to self-stitch the wound shut. "There were sutures on board," Tami wrote in her book, "but I couldn’t bring myself to sew my head shut." Instead, she drew the long wound together and adhered several large butterfly bandages as pus and blood oozed out.

Did Tami consider suicide while stranded at sea?

Yes. Weak, starving, injured, and let down after mistakenly thinking she saw an island on the horizon, at one point during her journey Tami loaded a rifle that was on board and stuck it in her mouth. The internal voice she heard during her journey convinced her to stop. This intense moment is not depicted in the film. While exploring the Tami Oldham true story, we learned that it wasn't the only time her despair had led her to thoughts of suicide. -Mirror Online Tami dealt with years of grief by eventually writing her story down and penning the book Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea . She is pictured on the left more than a decade after the tragedy.

How far did Tami Oldham sail before she reached land?

Tami navigated approximately 1,500 miles over a span of 41 days before reaching Hilo, Hawaii. As she approached the harbor, she saw a large ship on its way out. She shot off several flares before the 200+ foot vessel flashed its running lights and altered course. The ship pulled up alongside the Hazana. The crew lowered down coffee and someone tossed her an apple. They towed her inside the reef and a Coast Guard Auxiliary towed her the rest of the way. Similar to the Adrift movie's ending, as she pulled into the Big Island's Hilo Harbor, she cried tears of joy. -Mirror Online The Adrift movie ends similar to the real-life story.

Did Tami Oldham suffer any lasting injuries?

Yes. When the boat capsized, she struck her head so hard that she couldn't read a book for the next six years. The words leapt off the page as she tried to focus on them. -Mirror Online

Did Tami Oldham continue sailing after surviving being stranded at sea?

Yes. The tragedy she endured didn't stop her from continuing to enjoy sailing. She got right back into it. "I just love it," Tami told the Chicago Tribune . "I'm passionate about it. I kind of parallel [the hurricane] to being in a car accident. You get back in the car or, like they say, back on the horse." She went on to become a "100-ton licensed captain with more than 50,000 offshore miles" to her credit. Tami did struggle with grief and nightmares, and she spent the first eight years after the accident unable to heal. When she was able to read again, she began to deal with some of her feelings by writing her story down, eventually penning the book Red Sky in Mourning , which inspired the movie. She self-published the book in 1998, and it was later picked up by Hyperion Press and published widely in 2002. Tami says that she never went to counseling but wishes someone would have suggested it. "I definitely had some severe post-traumatic stress syndrome," she stated. "I really wish I had taken the time to do that." -Chicago Tribune Despite the tragedy, Tami never stopped sailing and became a 100-ton licensed captain. She is pictured here prior to the Adrift movie's 2018 release.

Did Tami Oldham ever marry?

Yes. Ten years after losing fiancé Richard Sharp at sea and surviving the ordeal, Tami met a blue-eyed man at a dance. They married in 1994, had two children, and live on San Juan Island, Washington. Tragically, their 22-year-old daughter, Kelli Ashcraft, was taken from them in 2017 as the result of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.

Dive deeper into the Adrift true story by watching the Tami Oldham Ashcraft movie interview below.

• Official Adrift Movie Website

40 people killed in migrant boat fire off Haiti’s coast, says aid agency

At least 40 people have died after the boat they were traveling in caught fire off the coast of Haiti earlier this week, the International Organization for Migration reported on Friday. Matias Delacroix/AP/File via CNN Newsource

At least 40 people have died after the boat they were traveling in caught fire off the coast of Haiti earlier this week, the  International Organization for Migration  (IOM) reported on Friday, citing local authorities.

The vessel left Haiti on Wednesday carrying over 80 migrants, and was headed to Turks and Caicos, the IOM said. Forty-one survivors were rescued by Haiti’s Coast Guard, it also said.

In a statement, Grégoire Goodstein, IOM’s chief of mission in the country, blamed the tragedy on Haiti’s spiraling security crisis and the lack of “safe and legal pathways for migration.”

“Haiti’s socio-economic situation is in agony. The extreme violence over the past months has only brought Haitians to resort to desperate measures even more,” he said.

Haiti is grappling with gang violence, a collapsing health system, and a lack of access to essential supplies, leading many Haitians to embark on dangerous journeys out of the country.

The Caribbean nation’s crisis escalated earlier this year when gang warfare exploded, forcing the resignation of the then-government. The number of migration attempts by boat from Haiti have risen since then, according to IOM data.

But chaos in the country has not stopped neighboring governments from repatriating Haitian migrants by the tens of thousands.

“More than 86,000 migrants have been forcibly returned to Haiti by neighboring countries this year. In March, despite a surge in violence and the closure of airports throughout the country, forced returns increased by 46 per cent, reaching 13,000 forced returns in March alone,” the agency said in its statement.

In recent weeks, the appointment of new  Prime Minister Garry Conille  and the arrival of several hundred foreign forces to bolster Haiti’s National Police have offered new hope for addressing the crisis. The United Nations Security Council-backed Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission, led by Kenya, is now beginning operations in Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.

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Boat fire kills at least 40 Haitian migrants, IOM reports

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Settlers, members of Israel's religious right and conservative Christians are working to convince Donald Trump and the Republican Party to drop longstanding U.S. support for a Palestinian state.

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How To Help Your Boat Survive A Major Storm

Hurricane Gloria was a most impolite lady. She barreled up the Atlantic coast, scaring the heck out of people from Florida to Massachusetts. Despite the fact that the storm didn’t live up to its billing, hundreds of boats in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts were destroyed or severely damaged. In some cases, the boats were lost through no fault of the owner. No amount of preparation will save your boat if another boat drags down on it in the middle of a hurricane.

In other cases, however, lack of proper preparation was a major cause of a damaged boat. There’s no excuse for that type of loss.

Despite the fact that modern forecasting methods are far from perfect, a large storm such as Gloria almost always is tracked with enough precision to let you know if you’re potentially in the path of destruction. With a day or more of warning, you have plenty of time to take the precautions necessary to give your boat the best chance to survive a major storm.

When the load exerted on a boat’s ground tackle-whether a mooring or her own anchors-exceeds the holding power of the ground tackle, the boat will drag. One of the primary contributors to that load is the windage of the boat.

If your boat hung perfectly head to wind, the windage loading would be fairly small, consisting of the frontal area of the hull, deck structures, spars, and rigging in the case of a sailboat, and the hull, deck structures, bridge, and antennas of a powerboat. Unfortunately, few boats lie perfectly head to wind through a storm. Instead, they yaw about from side to side. As the boat sails around on her anchors or mooring, the total area presented to the wind, and hence the total loading on the ground tackle, varies dramatically. The area presented by any boat broadside to the wind is several times that presented by the same boat when it is perfectly head to wind. Since the change in wind loading is a function of the square of the wind velocity, the strain on your ground tackle increases geometrically as the boat yaws around. Reducing windage will help reduce the total loading, and hence help your boat stay put.

You can substantially reduce the windage of any boat with only a few hours of work. First, remove Bimini tops, cockpit dodgers, spray curtains around cockpits, and awnings. Those are pretty obvious. The rest may not be.

Sails should be removed, particularly roller furling headsails. You don’t just have to worry about the windage of the rolled-up sails, you have to worry about what will happen when the sail unfurls. And we practically guarantee it will, no matter how well tied it may be. Mainsails should be removed for the same reason. If the sail is so big that you can’t handle it yourself, and you have no one to help, add extra sail ties, and thoroughly and tightly lash down the sail cover. The normal securing system of the sail cover, and the normal amount of sail ties used, is not adequate to hold the sail in place during a major storm. If the sail gets loose, it will at least flog itself to death. At worst, it will add enough windage to make your boat drag its ground tackle.

Take off man overboard gear, cockpit cushions, cowl vents, antennas, and halyards, if the halyards can be rerove easily. Internal halyards can be run to the masthead, leaving a single halyard led to deck to allow you to retrieve the others after the storm. No matter how well you tie them off, halyards will flog hell out of your spars, in addition to being more windage. Likewise, masthead instrumentation may simply blow away, particularly your anemometer cups.

Get it Off the Boat

It’s a good idea to take everything that isn’t bolted down off the boat entirely. If a boat does go ashore, it’s a sad but true fact that vandals may make short work of her. Electronics, clocks, barometers, books, navigation gear may all vanish. If you value it, take if off the boat. Chances are that no insurance policy will cover you completely enough to make up for the loss of valuable gear.

Know Your Ground Tackle

Is your mooring really a 1000 pound mushroom with 3/4 ” chain? It may be worth hiring a diver to find out, preferably before a storm threatens. Likewise, all shackles, chains, and mooring pennants should be examined at least once a season to make sure they are in good shape. If the condition of any component of the system is questionable, replace it. If your insurance adjuster sees a corroded through piece of chain or a mooring pennant that is badly worn, he may well be reluctant to approve your claim in case of loss.

In crowded harbors, permanent moorings may lack adequate scope to deal with the high tides associated with storm conditions. It may be possible to increase scope for a storm by replacing or lengthening the mooring pennant. Just as with an anchor, the holding power of a permanent mooring is increased by additional scope.

Some moorings are equipped with large, inflatable surface buoys. The positive flotation of these buoys may reduce the holding power of the mooring in extreme high tides, so it may be worth removing the buoy before a storm; just don’t forget to replace it before casting off the mooring pennant after the storm is over.

At the Dock

As a rule, boats tied to docks are at greater risk than boats kept at moorings or on anchors. Floating docks are rarely strong enough to take the loads exerted on them by boats in storm conditions. In addition, if the tides are extremely high, floating docks may simply float off the pilings which hold them in place.

A boat kept at a dock can’t weathercock (face into the wind) as storm winds change direction. Therefore, the boat at a dock almost always presents more windage than a boat secured to moorings or anchors that is free to swing head to wind.

If your boat must be kept at a dock in a storm, secure the lines to the pilings, rather than to the floating docks. It is best to tie the lines high on the pilings, so they will not be chafed if the docks ride up on the pilings. Instead of using loose bowlines around the pilings, use multiple clove hitches, or a clove hitch finished with two half hitches. That way, the lines will tighten on the pilings, and are unlikely to pull off even if the pilings go under.

Anchored Out

If you have good ground tackle and a good mooring won’t have to worry about crashing into docks, or docks crashing into you. What you will have to worry about is other boats with less adequate ground tackle dragging down on you, either damaging your boat or straining your own ground tackle so much that your boat drags.

The first rule of thumb when anchored or moored during a severe storm is to get out as much ground tackle as possible. You may have a good permanent mooring, but if you back it up with your own anchors, you’re going to have an even better chance of survival.

Usually, it is possible to forecast the likely direction of the strongest winds, even with a hurricane whose exact path is unknown. A good rule of thumb is to deploy your heaviest anchor in the expected direction of the strongest winds, and your second anchor 180 ’ from that. You may want to put your primary anchor upwind of, and at a 45 ’ angle to, the mooring, so there will be less likelihood of chafe between your anchor rode and your mooring chain.

When putting out your anchors, get them as far from the boat as your rodes will allow, leaving yourself perhaps 25 ‘ of line on deck to make adjustments after the anchors are down. The more scope you have out on the anchors, the better they will hold. All anchors hold best when the pull on them is perfectly horizontal. You may increase the holding power of an anchor by 25 % by increasing the scope from 5:1 to 1O:1.

Remember that your biggest anchor does not necessarily have the most holding power in a particular bottom. If you’re anchored in soft mud, a Danforth will have much more holding power than a kedge anchor of the same weight.

Line chafe has probably caused the loss of more boats than any other single factor. Whether you’re moored out or at the dock, your lines must be protected from chafe.

No matter how well polished your bow chocks are, they’re still metal, and are harder than your lines. In a storm lasting several hours, even the smoothest metal fittings will start to wear away your lines. Chafing gear can be made from almost any sacrificial material. Canvas and leather are the traditional materials used, but “sticky dacron” sail repair cloth or even old towelling or T-shirts will do. Old denim blue jeans cut in strips make exceptionally good chafing gear.

Chafing gear won’t do any good if it won’t stay in place. The best chafing gear is undoubtedly leather sewn over the lines, but if you’re preparing for a storm, it’s too late to be elegant. Duct tape-plenty of it-will do in a pinch.

You can also tie the chafing gear on with light nylon, but it, too will chafe.

Chafing gear should cover more of the line than you think will come into contact with a chafing hazard, to allow for fine tuning the lines, to compensate for stretch, and to make up for the fact that the chafing gear may slip under load. In addition, if you are aboard your boat during a storm, you may want to ease out a foot of line now and then to shift the location of chafe slightly.

Whenever possible, key dock lines should be doubled. If one fails, you want a backup. The only danger here is that the deck can quickly become a rat’s nest. In addition, those elegant little cleats may suddenly be too small to take two 3/4” dock lines. It is absolutely impossible for a boat to have cleats that are too large, just as it’s impossible to have anchors that are too big. All it takes is one storm to convince you of that.

Whenever possible, lead heavily loaded lines to winches before belaying them on cleats. Winches are likely to have more fastenings, distributing their load over a larger area of deck. Distributing the loads between a winch and a cleat can be a tricky business. Normally, when using a winch you take three turns around it, so that almost all the load is carried by the winch. Using only one or two turns on the winch allows more load to be carried by the cleat.

Don’t carry a lot of heavily loaded lines to a single cleat. That’s like putting all your eggs in one basket. If the cleat goes, the boat goes. This is when multiple cleats on the bow pay off. You can lead each anchor or mooring line to a separate cleat, not only making it easier to adjust individual lines, but distributing loads better.

Through bolted cleats are designed to be loaded in sheer; that is, with the load parallel to the cleat and perpendicular to the fastenings. When the load becomes a tension load-vertical to the fastenings-you’re headed for trouble. Watch the leads of lines carefully to load hardware properly. Sometimes, a strong snatch block can be used to deflect loading to a better angle, or to reduce chafe. For storm-induced loads, don’t use a block to change a lead more than about 45 ‘. You’re likely to induce loads on the block or its point of attachment that it just can’t handle.

Lines may well pop out of open bow chocks as the boat pitches. It may be possible to lash lines into chocks by passing a light line under the bow or to adjacent hardware. Closed chocks work better, but once again you have to watch the direction of loading. Closed chocks are designed to be loaded downward, not upward. If you put a tension load on the chock’s fastenings, they may pull out of the deck.

Obviously, the strength of your deck hardware is extremely important, and the time to check it out is before there is a danger of storms. Proper backing plates, proper bolts, and strength of the deck and the fitting itself are critical. Winter is a good time to crawl around under the deck to check these things out. You’ll sleep a lot easier knowing just how hardware is attached.

Hauling Out

Usually, boatyards are overwhelmed with frantic calls from owners to haul their boats before a hurricane. Hauling may or may not be a good idea. Hauling a boat and leaving the mast in is an invitation to disaster. Hauling at a yard that is only a few feet above water level also may gain little. Putting the boat inside a shed that may blow down also gets you nothing.

By all means, if your boat is trailerable, get it out of the water. Tow it to high ground, but don’t park it under a tree!

On or Off the Boat?

If your boat is on an anchor or mooring, you may increase its chances of survival by staying on the boat. You may be able to fend off a boat dragging down, adjust a critical line, take the load off the ground tackle by running the engine. You also increase your chances of getting killed or injured. Boats are replaceable; people are not.

There is no easy answer to this one. Few things are more heartbreaking than watching another boat chafe through your anchor lines while you’re helpless on the shore. Few things are more terrifying than being aboard a boat that is dragging down to destruction on a granite seawall that towers over your head.

Should You Move Your Boat?

One of the most basic questions is whether your boat should be moved to another harbor. Most regions have protected anchorages known as hurricane holes. The only problem is that usually these are known to everyone, and may become so crowded when a major storm threatens that they become more dangerous than a more exposed anchorage.

Moving to a hurricane hole early is no guarantee of safety. You may get the best spot, but there’s no way to keep someone from anchoring right on top of you. If you think all boat owners are a generous and gentlemanly bunch, you haven’t seen them in time of stress when their boats are endangered.

You must realistically assess your chances for survival wherever you are. If strong southerlies are forecast in a harbor whose north end is a stone wall, you’d better think about moving elsewhere, or at least moving as close under the weather shore as is practical. Don’t forget to allow for changes in wind direction, however.

The wind itself is usually less of a problem than high tides and waves which reduce scope and increase chafe as the boat surges. If you’re behind a seawall which is only 5 ‘ above mean high water, a storm which comes at high tide is likely to submerge the breakwater, exposing you to the full force of wind and waves.

Use common sense. Try to imagine what will happen to docks, pilings, seawalls, and the other boats around you. What happens when the wind shifts? What if the docks come loose? Don’t move your boat until you have a coherent plan, and only if you can say with confidence that the place you have chosen is better than the place you are. An exposed location with a bottom that has good holding characteristics may be better than a protected location with lousy holding, if you have adequate ground tackle.

If you’ve done all you can to secure the boat-reducing windage, removing valuable gear, putting out extra lines, chafing gear, anchors-then you have done all that is reasonable to ask to prepare your boat to meet a storm in port. Get off the boat with a clear conscience, but try to stay as close as possible during the storm, as long as you don’t risk your life. If your boat does come ashore, you may be able to reduce damage or prevent vandalism if you’re close at hand. We have no sympathy for those who call the boatyard a few days after a storm to find out if their boat has survived.

One last thing to do is to take pictures of your preparations. If your insurance company questions the loss of your boat, it helps to have pictures of how you’ve prepared her. It may also help to prove a loss.

Mentally preparing for a storm in port is a lot like thinking about your emergency equipment. It may be unpleasant to think you’ll ever need it, but if you do, it’s nice to be familiar with how it works and what it can do. Careful preparation of your boat won’t guarantee its survival, but it will give it a far better chance.

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Sailboat caught in Hurricane Julio

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Video by petty officer 2nd class tara molle   picture story 2017">   news photo (army and ngb only) 2016">   training documentation 2016">  , u.s. coast guard district 14 hawaii pacific.

The Coast Guard is coordinating the rescue of 42-foot sailboat Walkabout caught in Hurricane Julio 414 miles northeast of Oahu, Aug. 10, 2014. Walkabout is disabled and taking on water with three people aboard. (U.S. Coast Guard courtesy video)

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Better Sailing

Can a Sailboat Survive a Hurricane?

Are you about to set sail but you check the forecast and learn that your boat is in the path of an impending hurricane? So, what exactly do you have to do? Slack the lines, and seek for a hurricane hole where you can ride out the storm? On the other hand, if you don’t have time, you may have no choice but to tow the boat. Or perhaps you believe you’re safe on the dock and your only option is to double the dock lines and pray for the best. All sailors must be able to properly prepare for a storm, but what is the best technique? In this article, I’m going to analyze this subject as well as answer if a sailboat can survive during a hurricane. So, keep reading!

Hurricane Information

A hurricane, sometimes known as a cyclone or typhoon, is a tropical rotating storm in the North Atlantic Ocean. They also occur in the Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico with sustained winds of 74 mph or higher. Hurricanes only form over warm tropical oceans, usually above 27°C (81°F). You might also wonder when hurricanes strike. Hurricanes are known to strike the Northern Hemisphere during the months of June and November. Hurricanes, on the other hand, are more common in the Southern Hemisphere between December and May. The ‘hurricane season’ for a certain region is defined as the time of year when hurricanes strike that area.

Strong winds spiral inward and upward at speeds of 75 to 200 mph. And, they can be up to 600 miles across. Each hurricane lasts about a week and travels at 10 to 20 miles per hour over open water. Hurricanes gain energy and heat by interacting with warm ocean waters. The evaporation of seawater boosts hurricanes’ strength. In the Northern Hemisphere, hurricanes rotate counter-clockwise around an “eye,” while in the Southern Hemisphere, they rotate clockwise. The calmest area of the storm is the center, or “eye.” There are only low winds and pleasant weather in the center. Heavy rain, strong winds, and enormous waves can cause damage to buildings, trees, and automobiles when they arrive on land.

Hurricanes only form over extremely warm ocean water, at 80 degrees Fahrenheit or more. The atmosphere (air) must cool down quickly as you go higher. In order to force air upward from the water surface, the wind must also be blowing in the same direction and at the same speed. Above the storm, winds blow outward, allowing the air below to rise. Hurricanes are most common between the latitudes of 5 and 15 degrees north and south of the equator. The Coriolis Force creates the spin in a cyclone, but it is too weak near the equator to create storms.

Although hurricanes and cyclones occur all around the world, some locations are more vulnerable than others. When a hurricane strikes the North Atlantic, the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as the Caribbean Sea, are likely to be affected as well. Hawaii and the western coast of Mexico will be affected if it occurs in the Eastern Pacific. Typhoons that form in the western Pacific are more likely to strike Japan, China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Cyclones from the Indian Ocean regularly hit Southeast Asian countries, including the Indian subcontinent. Tropical cyclones in the southern Indian Ocean might hit Madagascar and countries along Africa’s east coast in the Southern Hemisphere. Cyclones that originate in the southeastern Indian Ocean are more likely to hit Australia’s northern coast.

Plan Ahead and Know the Facts

Actually, if you receive a hurricane warning, you usually only have 72 hours to prepare. As a result, having a plan in place before a hurricane strike is crucial. One of the greatest solutions is to find a hurricane hole away from the storm. But, this requires planning and the capacity to jump on your boat and relocate it. And any time you decide to get in the water, you must rely on every boat upwind of you to stay put. And, this can be risky. You must be quite cautious about where you choose to be. And, if the wind direction does not match the forecast, you may find many boats upwind of you that you did not expect to see.

The truth is that you are completely reliant on others. While taking your boat to a hurricane hole to ride out the storm is an option for some, there are two major considerations. Firstly, you must have enough time to move your boat and place your anchors before the storm hits. And, you must trust the other boaters who are holed up with you. If these issues are a problem, you may need to consider other solutions. Hauling the boat is one apparent option. Having the boat out of the water significantly improves your chances of survival. If something goes wrong when the boat is on the hard, the damage is most likely repairable.

When a boat is damaged in the water, it usually sinks. Again, this will require planning and time. But, carrying your boat is usually easier than heading to a storm hole. Also, most boatyards will be able to help you if you get in line early enough. However, being hauled out does not guarantee your safety. You must still prepare the boat for the approaching storm. You should remove all canvas, sails, bimini tops, and other accessories, as well as everything else off the deck, and make sure the boat is watertight.

>>Also Read: Why Do Boat Insurance Companies Require Hurricane Plans?

What to Do To Avoid Hurricanes

In an ideal situation, you should relocate your boat and sail away from the hurricane. Keep in mind that the hurricane’s center has winds of 200 mph or more. Also, note that the wind increases less the further you sail from the hurricane’s center. So, if you sail 50 to 100 miles away, you’ll be in a safer location.

One thing about storms is that you know what is their direction at least a week ahead of time, so you’ll have plenty of time to get out before the hurricane arrives. This ensures that both you and your boat are safe and secure. During severe storms, the second option is to seek shelter in a hurricane hole. Hurricane holes are bays and harbors, or deep, narrow coves or inlets covered by trees. They provide the finest spots to tie off your anchor lines and prevent the wind and waves. The finest hurricane holes are uncrowded areas that are far enough inland. They’re able to avoid wind and surges while still being close enough to be easily reached from the land. Hurricane holes exist in places like Guatemala, the Caribbean, Cuba, and Haiti. It’s of great importance to locate a protected hurricane hole in the area where you will be sailing ahead of time.

Secure the Boat with Anchors

The anchors and anchor rodes are subjected to severe forces during strong storms and hurricanes. So, you have to choose a reliable anchor. Helix Anchors are one of the best on the market, according to BoatUS, since they screw into the water surface. Note that Helix Anchors are far more powerful than Mushroom or other forms of anchors. They can hold between 12,000 and 20,000 pounds of weight that cannot be wrenched free. To have sufficient protection from the hurricane’s enormous wind surges, it’s critical to employ several anchors. You can also use Setting Tandem Anchors or anchors in several directions. If you have two large anchors, space them about 90 degrees apart in the direction of the expected wind.

Reduce Windage

Whether your boat is at anchor, moored, docked, or even hauled out, decreasing windage is critical. This is because it reduces stress on the boat and its attachment points. Even when the boat is at anchor or moored, it virtually never rests precisely head to wind. You can almost always be sure it won’t be facing directly into the wind if you’re at a dock, tied to mangroves, or in a boatyard. Note that the narrower the boat’s profile, the less surface area for the wind to hit it. Overall, the rig is less stressed, and the boat heels less. This will also reduce chafing on lines, and lower the load on the anchor, mooring, dock, or whatever else the boat is linked to. Keep in mind that you have to remove canvas, dodgers and biminis, dinghy, and the genoa as well. Remove and stow the mainsails as well.

Plan Wisely

Always stay informed on hurricanes and heavy storms wherever you sail. Use resources like Boatus.com and Global Weather Tracker to acquire the most up-to-date information on hurricanes. If you intend to haul or relocate your boat, make sure to notify your marina operator ahead of time. It is common knowledge that boats kept on land are far safer than those kept in the sea. In addition, it is important to understand the insurance policy as well as the marina contracts. For example, prior to a storm or hurricane, it is usual for insurance companies to reimburse up to 50% of the cost of carrying or transferring your vessel.

If your boat must be in the water, you have to relocate it to a hurricane hole or other location with the least amount of storm damage. Canals are ideal hiding spots since they allow you to tighten lines on both sides of the boat, preventing it from moving and wobbling. When a storm or hurricane looms, you have to take the necessary precautions ahead of time. Plan ahead of time and think of where your vessel will best survive the storm. Prepare a hurricane hole where you may dock your boat throughout the storm. You can minimize the risk of damage by picking the most storm-safe position well before the forecast predicts the hurricane, according to insurance claim files.

Bear in mind that the captain’s seamanship is the most important factor. In other words, if he or she is far from land or other hazards and knows how to steer the boat through the hurricane or storm. A large and seaworthy sailboat that is mostly for cruising rather than racing is also much better to have.

How To Prepare for Hurricanes

If you’re going to stay on a dock, you’ll want to go to a marina with large pilings. Nowadays, and especially in vulnerable hurricane areas, many marinas are working to raise piling heights. The boats are better placed where they can be contained in the marina, as compared to those on the hard who can be hoisted up and swept away by the surge. Many marinas and boatyards are implementing a new approach that is a variation of the classic method. This method refers to hauling out and tying down the boat using construction-style tow straps tied to firm points on the ground. This keeps the boats in their jack stands regardless of how high the storm surge reaches.

Many marinas now have hardpoints to which straps can be fastened. This secures down the boats when they’re on the hard. And the standard has been that boats are either stored in storm-resistant storage structures or are tied down. If the boats don’t lift off the jack stands then the water level isn’t high enough to flood the boats. For sailors hauling out their boats, this combination of hauling the boat, sealing it tight, and tying it down appears to be the best solution.

Finding a hurricane hole is one possibility, but you’ll need the time to do so and be continuously mindful of other vessels around and their capacity to hold their ground. You can keep your boat lashed to the dock at the marina, but if the storm surge becomes too high, your boat may float away. You can tow the boat, but you must ensure that it’s well-secured so that the rain doesn’t flood it. Bear in mind that you must contend with the potential of a storm surge sweeping your boat away.

Again, sailors must be aware of everything. In other words, ensuring that everything is watertight, clearing everything off the deck, and stripping all canvas. When you do that leave the boat on the hard tied down to several hardpoints and physically anchor it to the pavement. This will keep it secure and give you the best chance of making it through the storm.

Being Onboard During the Hurricane

Keep in mind that you are on your own during the hurricane. There is no one to assist you, and you will be unable to assist others. Of course, you have your crew but still, everyone has to take care of themselves before assisting others. Because the status of the boat and the storm might alter in just a second, make sure you have everything you need on hand and ready.

Note that you should wear appropriate gear. During the hurricane, it will be damp, rainy, and possibly cold. Wetsuits, waterproof shoes, or boots are a must during a storm. If you’re on the deck, make sure you’re wearing a life jacket and harness. Using your snorkel masks is quite practical because it is much easier to keep watch and breathe during a severe storm.

Don’t omit to check your anchor lines and chafe gear for safety on a regular basis. Make sure they’re in good working order and don’t have damages. High waves and rain will fill your boat with water, so keep in mind that you might need to use the bilge pump occasionally. Keep an eye on the deck as well as the radar or GPS during the storm. Lastly, consider if you’re dragging or whether another boat is dragging towards you.

Can Sailboats Survive Hurricanes? – The Bottom Line

Bear in mind that it is not just the sailor who must adapt to a hurricane, but also the infrastructure for protection that has to improve. And it’s a problem that we’ll almost certainly see more of in the future. Based on rising sea levels and storm concentration, we’re fairly confident that surges will become a more essential feature of storms. Moreover, if global warming continues at its current rate, sea levels and storm strength will grow, making this a bigger problem.

When hauling your boat and preparing for a hurricane, there are a few things you should do. Firstly, remove everything on your canvas, including sails, coverings, biminis, and seat cushions. Make sure your boat is completely watertight by closing all hatches and sealing any leaks. There is going to be a lot of rain, so you must be well-prepared. If possible, use tow-straps to secure the boat to hardpoints on the ground. Furthermore, turn off all of your boat’s electronics and disconnect the batteries. In case your boat fills up with water, you’ll want to do everything you can to avoid damages to the electronics. If you have a propane burner, turn it off and disconnect and remove the tank. And, this applies to any additional oil cans, gas cans, or other combustible items from the boat.

I hope that this article has answered your questions and provided all the adequate information you need to know about hurricanes. I wish you all safe & pleasant voyages!

Peter is the editor of Better Sailing. He has sailed for countless hours and has maintained his own boats and sailboats for years. After years of trial and error, he decided to start this website to share the knowledge.

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What sailboats could survive a full blown hurricane at sea?

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What sailboats are the most seaworthy? Boats that can withstand 30+ foot ocean waves?  

Does "full blown" mean Category1? Or Category5? Read "Fastnet, Force 10" to get some idea how boats do at sea.  

The Westsail 32 in the book/movie The Perfect Storm survived. But, survival also depends on how well the boat was maintained. That same Westsail in poor condition may have had a different ending.  

A 30 foot wave at sea and and a thirty foot wave on your local beach are not the same thing. A thirty foot wave at sea only occasionally breaks and when it does, only a portion of it becomes white water. Don't get me wrong, the energy in that portion is still formidable and can do damage but it isn't like the breaking wave that hits land. Mostly you sail over thirty foot waves at sea without incident. Another thing to consider is surfing. In my opinion allowing you boat to surf swells of 30 feet is playing Russian Roulette - eventually one will kill you. I won't elaborate here. We sailed through a storm with 80kn and 30+ feet. We got knocked down twice by breaking waves as described above but we safely "sailed" over hundreds more. We sustained more damage from the wind than from the sea. We have a 44ft GRP sloop. Was that a "full blown hurricane"? No because it only lasted two days. But in terms of wind speed and wave size, yes it probably equaled a Cat 1. Would you survive a Cat 5? I don't think so.  

I presume you are looking for a neat list. Do you want that in alphabetical order or by LOA? Color?  

Big ships often fair worse than a small sailboat in extreme conditions. Whereas a large ship may span a few waves and beak her back, a strong, small sailboat would be much like a cork, if watertight. I have survived 2 hurricanes at sea in sailboats. The first was just west of Fiji, probably a high cat 1, but it was before satellites so it may not be a "full blown" storm in your mind. We were capsized 3 times and sustained a lot of damage, but she got us back to a safe anchorage, so I guess she was a pretty good boat, considering she was 65 when she went through it. The second storm was in the western Indian ocean and because we were beating, we escaped the full force of the storm, but it was still 45 to 60 knots for 10 very difficult days as the darn thing chased us across the ocean. That boat was Brown 37' trimaran, which handled quite a few "heavy weather" experiences very well, including 1200 miles up the Red Sea in northerlies. Once again, it would very much depend on the choices made by and the experience of the captain (certainly NOT the case in the hurricane (cyclone if you prefer) off Fiji, as I made some very bad choices, but as they say, "hindsight is 20/20"); good choices increase the survivability in any situation, especially at sea, in heavy weather.  

In general, and your sea miles may vary: NO sailboat is guaranteed to survive a hurricane. There are no guarantees at sea, except that the sea has a good chance of finding its way through weaknesses in either boat or crew. Any small boat skipper who intentionally challenges a hurricane would seem likely to be either a fool, harboring a death wish, under terrible pressure, seriously unlucky, or extraordinarily delusionally over-confident. Theoretically, a boat could be designed for having a maximum probability of surviving hurricanes, but it might have to be so over-built that it would be a pig in normal conditions. (glossing over some discussion of Westsails and such like) There are boats built to sail in heavy conditions, and one could do a lot with flotation, water tight compartments, over-built rigs, high-strength impact-resistant hulls, more-or-less bulletproof steering systems, control lines led to sheltered locations, etc. If one were wealthy. But, a thirty-foot breaking wave can simply overpower most smaller craft, depending on how it catches a boat and how well the crew is able to anticipate and respond. With good voyage planning and weather routing and an efficient boat, a smart and not-too-unlucky crew can avoid most of the really heavy weather. What's sometimes harder to avoid and to manage is the really light stuff.  

What sailboat could survive a full-blown hurricane at sea? A fortunate one.  

Read God Forsaken Sea by Derek Lundy. Be prepared for some terrible gut wrenching descriptions.  

Me too. I cant remember ever hearing about a battleship or an aircraft carrier going down due to rough weather. And, the food is good.  

maybe not breaking it's back.. but my father rememebers seeing the intrepid with her flightdeck even with the water... and he was on an LST. The carrier sailors joked that people on his ship should have gotten Submarine pay as they spent most of the time under the waves. From what he tells of the story, they were taking 50 degree rolls.. LSTs are only supposed to take 40 before the capsize. I know of the Westsail that survived the perfect storm.. and a few Alberg 37s that survived some serious weather. Two that went through the Fast Net Gale with minimal damage and one that wound up beached with only scratches from a hurricane  

The USN would disagree with the idea that warships are safe in a typhoon. In 1944 a number of ships were capsized and lost in Typhoon Cobra. Typhoon Cobra (1944) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia There are too many variables to say which boats would survive a hurricane. In a class 5 hurricane in the dangerous quadrant, essentially NO sailboat would be likely to survive. Currents, types of wave action, proficiency of the captain and crew, equipment on board, strategies for dealing with big seas, and whether you've pissed off Neptune...all variables making huge differences in ability to handle bad weather. It's not just the boat. An Alberg 35 survived the Fastnet storm by just taking sails down and going below with bare poles.  

smurphny said: The USN would disagree with the idea that warships are safe in a typhoon. In 1944 a number of ships were capsized and lost in Typhoon Cobra. Typhoon Cobra (1944) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ... Click to expand...

Read "Rescue in the Pacific". Great book, not a hurricane, but a nasty storm none-the-less. All but one of the 'boats' survived it. It was the people that didn't.  

OK, fine. Then I won't go to sea in a warship. That settles it.  

I think it was one of Michner's books, maybe Tales of the South Pacific , that has a great fictional/historical account of this storm and what it must have been like to come upon the tragic sight of the wrong side of a destroyer from the deck of a sister ship.  

Might have been. Will have to search around and find where that section came from. It was a really haunting description, in the middle of a raging storm, of one warship looking out ahead and coming upon one that had capsized. Really presented a vivid and disturbing scene that has stuck with me.  

Make all the boat lists you want , but the thing that most makes a boat seaworthy is the person sailing her. There's no magic pill to get you through 30 foot seas. The best regarded blue water vessel ill managed at sea isn't worth spit . Conversely , a lessor boat skillfully handled might make a miracle .  

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At least three dead in Haiti after boat catches fire during escape attempt

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PORT-AU-PRINCE (AP) — At least three people were dead and up to 40 others remain missing after a boat in the waters off northern Haiti caught fire with up to 80 Haitians on board trying to escape to the Turks and Caicos Islands, a government official said Friday.

Civil Protection official Jean Henry-Petit said at least 31 people had been rescued by the Haitian coast guard.

The dead included the captain of the boat, according to Arnold Jean, a spokesperson for the police in Cap-Haïtien.

The fire likely started when two drums of gasoline ignited, Henry-Petit said. Passengers were drinking rum and whiskey, according to a witness, which may have come into contact with the flammable substance, causing the fire.

The police said the migrants were heading toward Providenciales, an island in the Caribbean archipelago the Turks and Caicos Islands.

On Friday, the Haitian police announced they were searching for the organizers of this clandestine trip and have launched an investigation to gather information to make arrests.

The incident comes as rampant violence continues to take hold of Haiti ‘s capital and beyond amid political turmoil. Armed gangs launched coordinated attacks in February, taking control of more than two dozen police stations and opening fire on Haiti’s main airport, which closed for nearly three months.

Since then, nearly 580,000 people have been displaced in the country, according to the U.N.

• boat accident

Good Samaritan pulls 4 from water, but 1 missing after tugboat submerges, Coast Guard says

HARRIS COUNTY, Texas (KTRK) -- Authorities are searching for one person who went missing after a tugboat flipped over in east Harris County waters on Friday afternoon.

According to the U.S. Coast Guard, five people were aboard the tugboat when it flipped over just before 3 p.m. at the 16500 block of Peninsula Boulevard near San Jacinto Boulevard.

Four out of five people were recovered from the water and stabilized.

A Coast Guard helicopter and boats are searching for the missing person with a Harris County dive team.

The USCG credited a good Samaritan with helping recover the four rescued passengers.

For news updates, follow Luke Jones on Facebook , X and Instagram .

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FBI says man wanted on child sex trafficking charge may be hiding in Tampa area

• Emily Wunderlich Times staff

The FBI says it is searching for a fugitive wanted on a child sex trafficking charge who may be hiding in the Tampa area.

Donald Eugene Fields II, 60, was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in May 2023. He was federally indicted on one count of child sex trafficking in December 2022. Fields and Theodore “Ted” John Sartori Sr. were accused of “knowingly attempting to recruit, entice, provide, patronize and solicit a minor into engaging in a commercial sex act from about January 2013 until June 2017,” the FBI said in a news release Friday.

In a December 2022 court hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Dianna Collins said Sartori provided cash, cars, motorcycles, vacations and Christmas presents to Fields in exchange for access to the victim. Sartori was indicted on a charge of child sex trafficking and pleaded not guilty in December 2022. He is still awaiting trial.

Fields also faces charges of statutory rape, statutory sodomy, child molestation and witness tampering in Franklin County Circuit Court in Missouri. The court issued a warrant for his arrest after Fields “vacated his home” and failed to show up for a hearing on March 3, 2022, according to the FBI. A federal arrest warrant was issued for him on Dec. 8, 2022.

The FBI believes Fields could be hiding in the Tampa area since he was known to vacation in Florida. He may also be hiding in central Missouri, a few hours from where he used to live in Franklin County. The FBI is running ads in those areas on Facebook and Instagram.

Fields has a large tribal print tattoo near his shoulder and “may be relying on cash jobs such as tree-trimming,” according to the news release. The FBI previously said Fields had worked as a resale shop owner and an independent used car dealer.

The FBI is offering up to $250,000 for information leading to his arrest. Tips can be submitted online at tips.fbi.gov or by calling 1-800-225-5325.

Editor, Breaking News

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Saharan dust shields hurricane development, but watch out for Florida heat Saturday

While the National Hurricane Center continued its confidence that there would be no tropical activity in Atlantic areas for the next week, Saharan dust and a few tropical waves were what forecasters watched Saturday.

The real impact for Florida on Saturday will come from the heat. The entire Florida peninsula can expect triple-digit heat indexes with some in Southwest Florida predicted for 110 degrees, and 106 as far north as Jacksonville. Heat advisories are in effect for seven South Florida counties.

A wave of Saharan dust is expected to arrive in South Florida Saturday morning and move north, arriving around Cape Canaveral by Sunday. The dust is expected to be thickest in South Florida , dissipating as it moves north.

➤  Track all active storms

Tropical moisture may increase Florida's rain chances starting Monday, but, according to Ryan Truchelut, chief meteorologist at WeatherTiger, it won’t be anything organized. Saharan dust, high wind shear and other factors are expected to keep the tropics quiet for the days ahead.

The Hurricane Center is monitoring three tropical waves.

The peak of hurricane season runs from mid-August through mid-October. If your hurricane supplies are running low, or you haven't started an emergency kit, Florida's next sales tax holiday the end of August can help you save money.

Possible impact of tropical wave on Florida

A tropical wave is expected to approach the Florida peninsula Sunday, bringing downpours and gusty thunderstorms. A couple of waterspouts could occur, according to AccuWeather.

"As the tropical wave approaches and moves northwestward across the state from Sunday to Tuesday , an uptick in the showers and thunderstorms will occur with the potential for some to bring flooding downpours, strong wind gusts and even waterspouts near the beaches," AccuWeather Lead Hurricane Expert Alex DaSilva said.

The tropical wave is not forecast to develop into a tropical depression or a named tropical storm.

Florida weather radar: Track storms as they move across state

Saharan dust map: how long will tropics remain quiet.

The Saharan dust and winds are keeping the tropics quiet now, but forecasters say that will likely change.

"The favorable conditions that yielded Beryl are likely to return at some point in August, and that will probably yield an extended burst of hurricane activity ," said Dr. Ryan Truchelut, chief meteorologist at WeatherTiger.

"WeatherTiger’s real-time forecast remains for around twice the amount of storm activity in a normal hurricane season."

The next storm of the se ason will be Debby.

Extreme heat continues across Florida. See weather watches, warnings

Portions of Southeast, South, Southwest Florida: Head index of 105-110 expected today.

Counties under a heat advisory include:

Palm Beach County

Collier County

Broward County

Miami-Dade County

What is NOAA tracking in Atlantic basin?

The National Hurricane Center said no tropical cyclone activity is expected over the next several days.

Elsewhere in the tropics, the National Hurricane Center is monitoring three tropical waves. Here's the latest update from the NHC as of 8 a.m. July 20:

Tropical wave 1: An eastern Atlantic wave was identified via satellite imagery. It's producing some showers.

Tropical wave 2: In the central Caribbean, this wave is expected to move from the Windward Passage to northern Colombia and helping to induce scattered to numerous showers with embedded thunderstorms over Hispaniola and regional waters as well as across the Windward Passage and the waters between eastern Cuba and Jamaica. These storms may produce heavy downpours, lightning and gusty winds.

Tropical wave 3: Another tropical wave over the Yucatan Peninsula and Guatemala is moving westward and producing scattered showers and may produce gusty winds or stronger storms in parts of the region.

Who is likely to be impacted?

A tropical wave is expected to bring tropical moisture to Florida starting Sunday.

Forecasters urge all residents to continue monitoring the tropics and to always be prepared. That advice is particularly important for what is expected to be a very active hurricane season.

When is next Florida hurricane tax-free supplies holiday?

Save on hurricane supplies between Aug. 24 and Sept. 6. This will be the final tax-free holiday for 2024 when it comes to emergency supplies and it comes during the busiest period of the hurricane season.

Can't afford a generator or weeks of food? Here are the basics you should have on hand.

Eligible items included in the tax-free holiday  include:

A  portable generator  used to provide light or communications or preserve food in the event of a power outage with a sales price of $3,000 or less.

A tarp or other flexible waterproof sheeting with a sales price of $100 or less.

An item normally sold as, or generally advertised as, a ground anchor system or tie-down kit with a sales price of $100 or less.

A smoke detector or smoke alarm with a sales price of $70 or less.

A fire extinguisher with a sales price of $70 or less.

A carbon monoxide detector with a sales price of $70 or less.

A nonelectric food storage cooler with a sales price of $60 or less.

A portable power bank with a sales price of $60 or less.

A gas or diesel fuel tank with a sales price of $50 or less.

A portable self-powered radio, two-way radio, or weather-band radio with a sales price of $50 or less.

A package of AA-cell, AAA-cell, C-cell, D-cell, 6-volt, or 9-volt batteries, excluding automobile and boat batteries, with a sales price of $50 or less.

A portable self-powered light source (powered by battery, solar, hand-crank, or gas) with a sales price of $40 or less, including: flashlights, lanterns and candles.

Eligible light sources and radios qualify for the exemption, even if electrical cords are included in the purchase.

Reusable ice (ice packs) with a sales price of $20 or less.

➤  See full list of items, including pet and cleaning supplies, exempt from sales tax

When is the Atlantic hurricane season?

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through Nov. 30.

When is the peak of hurricane season?

The peak of the season is Sept. 10, with the most activity happening between mid-August and mid-October, according to the Hurricane Center.

National Hurricane Center map: What are forecasters watching now?

Systems currently being monitored by the National Hurricane Center include:

Interactive map: Hurricanes, tropical storms that have passed near your city

Excessive rainfall forecast, what's next.

We will continue to update our tropical weather coverage daily. Download your local site's app to ensure you're always connected to the news. And look for our  special subscription offers here .

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: NHC forecasts no storms, but heat is Florida weather to watch

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