On Sat, 4 Sep 2010 14:12:40 -0400, you wrote: >On Sat, Sep 04, 2010 at 01:39:51PM -0400, Philip wrote: >> There must be some ground between "crying wolf" and being complacent. >> Those who sell the events of the day do not seem to have developed that >> ability - much to their shame. > >Yeah, but Phil - if people didn't demonize the other side, how could you >possibly hope to have controversy? :)
<snip lots of good stuff> I think the hype comes not from the government but from the news organizations. As a boater, you must take some responsibility for winnowing the wheat from the chaff. You must decide how much preparation is enough. My son-in-law in Florida does not put the storm shutters up unless he agrees with the predictions. He and our daughter went through Andrew and he's lived in FL most of his life so he's pretty savvy. But once the high winds get there, it is too late to be dealing with big pieces of wood or metal. If you are in the Caribbean or the Baja, you must decide a couple of days in advance if you want to go to a hurricane hole or whatever you want to do to prepare. It will take that long to do the things that need to be done. If you don't decide well in advance, the places will be filled and you won't have a secure anchorage and your boat will get loose and sink other boats or get washed up on shore or worse. Bob went down and secured the boat by wrapping the sails and topping up the batteries and other such things as he thought necessary. We did not expect much here and we didn't get much. He also check that the generator worked (see below). It isn't just buying TP and milk when a storm is predicted. OTOH for Isabel, he went down and spider-webbed the boat into the dock with spring lines. He took the sails and bimini off and stored them. Some people left the dock and anchored out. Some had their boats hauled. Our boat and most others survived fine, but some of the storm surge went up into some marinas and knocked all the boats off the jackstands into each other. Because of the fact that Bob built an electric car, he also had an emergency generator for it and that enabled us to survive and have the frig, freezer, TV and computer running a couple hours a day for the week that we didn't have electricity at the house. We could also have gone and lived on the boat. The marina didn't have water or bathrooms because they have a well and they didn't have electricity, but we had water and heads on the boat. The limiting factor would have been fuel because their fuel dock didn't have power either. But we could have put the sails back up and sailed if we'd wanted to go someplace. _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
