September 21-27, 2024
Port Royal, SC
Saturday, September 21-
At least we had a day at the beach – the first sunny weekend day since Labor Day.
We needed that sunshine and sea breeze because we both were recovering from COVID (me) or something like COVID (John). This was my first bout of COVID and I was really lucky that the symptoms were pretty mild.
Monday, September 23
Yay, Mondays with no internet, wi-fi, or…cell service for most of the day. I worked pretty late in a school in Hilton Head and had no way to communicate with John or my work team. We also had no way of knowing what was happening because all of our news is delivered online. I wound up getting my news from a woman in the grocery store.
Thursday, September 26
How the day started (this is a part of my district and it happened while kids were on their way to school):
How the day ended:
John is Captain Badass – he stayed onboard in case urgent actions were required – while I spent the night in a hotel. Forty-two mph winds are no joke and those gusts are awful.
There’s a lesson here, too – really big hurricanes/tropical storms have much wider impacts than the cone of probability for the eye. Since the most commonly shown map was for the eye of the storm, Helene caught a lot of people unaware and unprepared.
John prepped Lailia with extra lines which helped keep Lailia unscathed but there’s a lot of damage in our marina.
The worst is a sailboat sank. It damaged another boat, too.
Another boat slammed the dock so much that both the dock and the boat’s hull are destroyed.
Yet another boat came loose and slammed into its neighbor – it broke a window, took a chunk of the deck and bent the metal rail. The damaged boat also lost its canvas top AND a hatch cover – no hatch means rain poured in.
One of the Freedom Boat Club boats was pretty destroyed, too. It took out chinks from the dock and also managed to knock over the security camera pole.
We also had no power and the marina water was turned off until the plumbing could be inspected. Water was restored by dinner time, so we could refill our tank. The power is out in much of the area, so we’re going to have to wait. We still have the generator we borrowed so we can have air conditioning when we sleep.
Even though many in this area are without power, we know this is minor in comparison to the folks in the Carolina mountains who are dealing with devastating flooding causing the loss of life and livelihood.
Life on Lailia 