Hurricane Matt - Oct. 2016

We arrived to Florida on 9-30-16 following a week in Crisfield MD for a MTOA rendezvous. We were still in the process of organizing adn unpacking from our summer at the Cape, when the Hurricane became imminent on 10-7-16. We were initially given voluntary evacuations warning, but then the warning changed in the early morning of 10-6-16 to mandatory. We were provided shelter my our neighbors Jim and Kathy Booth who had a rental property that just happened to be empty about 5 miles inland. As the house wa empty, our packing and to include chairs to sit on, something to sleep on, clothing, food, and little things like can opera, a pots to cook etc...... Later in the afternoon of 10-6-16, we were told there was a very strong possibility that our whole neighborhood would go underwater due to the storm surge. We had a 8:00 PM to be out of our house, so we drove back to our house to pick up everything we could up off the floors, gather some irreplaceable valuables, and gathered more supplies just in case we lost our home. We weathered the storm fine as the house we went to was fairly new construction and had hurricane shutters. We lost our power about 8:00 AM as the hurricane approached and our communication with what was going on was limited and frustrating. Around 5:00 PM we knew the eye of the storm had passed. We were not suppose to return to our house, but could not stand it any longer. We did return home tour 5:30 PM and were so relieved to find that our home and not been flooded and our boat was still floating. We did sustain a direct hit with the wind and suffered roof and lanai damage, and a debris loaded yard - but we are beyond grateful that it was not worse !!

Hunkered down in our "Safe House" We lost electricity but had plenty of candles and lanterns.

We had one window that did not have a hurricane shutter on it. Crew kept watch for us on the Hurricane progress.

This is our boat right before we evacuated. We had multiple lines tied anywhere we could find to secure them, and three anchors set to keep Sundance smashing apart on the dock. The challenge was figuring out how much slack to leave on the lines to accommodate for the predicted storm surge.

These photos were taken at the end of the hurricane by our neighbor across the canal - at least we knew Sundance was still floating, and our boat house was intact.