August 25, 2011.

Working here in Annapolis while a Hurricane bears down is a little bizarre. All day the marina was a flurry of activity as preparations were going on. The phones were ringing non-stop all day with people who wanted to be pulled out or were looking for an inside track on getting them hauled at another marina.

I've been working on one boat for several days. First I had to install separate refrigeration and freezer systems in the boat. That all went very well and both boxes are nice and frosty. While the boat was on the hard so I could install keel coolers, the owners stopped in and removed the old name from the boat and applied the new name.

There’s a superstition that says it's bad luck to change the name of a boat. There is an alcohol based ceremony that if performed properly will keep the bad luck at bay. They changed the name on Monday, we had an earthquake on Tuesday and now there’s a hurricane scheduled for the weekend. Coincidence.....?

Today I installed a 400 watt solar array on their boat. I built and prewired as much of it as I could yesterday and had it installed and ready to go by noon today. The moment I was ready to hit the “go” button the skies went dark and opened up. I was looking forward to seeing how much power the new array was going to put out and the rain kinda put the kibosh on that. I think they screwed up the ceremony. Just sayin'.

Afterwards I got to be a yard dog again and pitched in to help pull and store boats. It's fun, I enjoy it and it looks like I’ll have another 2 days of the same as we wait for Irene to drop in.

We have the option of being pulled, but after watching several different weather sources we've decided to ride this one out. We're in a very protected corner of a tiny, tight tributary off Back Creek. The wind forecast has the highest winds coming out of the direction of our best protection. Our biggest concern is the storm surge.

The forecasters all seem to have it in the ballpark of 4-6 feet. That means the tide could be several feet higher than normal. The biggest fluctuation is after the surge. The water is supposed to be blown out of the bay with the water possibly dropping 10 feet more than normal. That might suck since we usually only have 2 feet of water under us in the slip. But it may end as a great photo op (or an insurance claim). We'll just have to wait and see.