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A STORY BOOK TALE
Edwin P. Cutler



A HURRICANE WITH NO WIND




    

    
     We woke up at 4:30 in the morning when our boat began rolling ominously.
     We were anchored in beautiful, well protected, Admiralty Bay in Bequi, the island below St. Vincent. Hurricane Lenny was churning the waters along the Virgin Islands, 600 miles north of us -- we had a lot to learn about NORTHERS.
     It was dead calm in Bequi and the seas had been flat for days. But on the morning of Tuesday, the 17th day of November 1999 we were awakened when our boat, Spaceship Earth, began rolling from side to side.
    
     We had the starboard hook down just off Schooner's dock and were sure the waves were from the St Vincent ferry that plowed into the bay several times each day. But even the Bequians don't get up to go across to Kingstown on St. Vincent at four thirty in the morning.
    

    
     Clinging to handholds, designed for heavy weather sailing, we crawled out into the cockpit to look around. Strange swells were coming around the headland beneath Fort Ruin Lookout that normally protected the harbor. As we watched we saw them growing as they surged into the anchorage until they were beginning to break into greybeards.

     Our depth sounder, which had read a steady fifteen feet the day before was now dropping to ten feet in the troughs and climbing to twenty on the crests of the waves. We were riding on ten foot waves in the anchorage!
     Little did we know that rings of long low waves, blown outward by Hurricane Lenny, which was now just south of Puerto Rico, were pounding all the Windward Islands on their vulnerable west shores, destroying docks, piling beach sands into the yards of houses and invading the first floors of hotels that offer paradise to tourists.
     Bob Law's fifty foot long Pistachio, a trimaran, was even closer to the protective headland and between disappearing in the troughs she was tossed into the air, clear out of the water, when the frothing green water crests threw her skyward. Have you ever seen a fifty foot boat tossed into the air in a harbor?
     One of Daffodil's sons swam out to Pistachio on a surfboard to help Bob get free of his numerous anchors. They slipped several lines, leaving anchors to be found later and Bob finally began motoring out. The young man started paddling back to the dock, but got rolled by a swell and lost the board. He free swam to the end of the dock and climbed up. We were surprised when he ran to shore as if panicked, but gritted our teeth watching the dock break up behind him -- he just made it.
     Something had to be done. But what? With no wind, we couldn't sail out of the trap and our engine was partly dismantled, waiting for parts that had failed to come on the ferry the previous afternoon. The growing swells were tossing us like a log on a trampoline.
     Rudolph of Salanger came by in his dinghy and carried our port anchor out to its rode end to help keep us from being washed ashore. We were farther out, but our regular anchor was now between us and shore lots of good it was doing!
     We clung to the cockpit combing when a foaming graybeard rolled over us filling our cockpit and tearing our dinghy loose, and I contemplated losing our boat on the stone and cement seawall not far away.
     But again the people of Bequia came to our rescue! McCarthy of Taxi number 1 came close by and said you have to get out of here. His mate, Glen, jumped on board Spaceship and he and I got the port anchor up so McCarthy could tow us even farther out than Rudolph had earlier. We let out all 250 feet of chain on the starboard anchor but we were still not out far enough. Risking the loss of an anchor and all that chain, we finally cut the rope at the bitter end and slipped the starboard anchor.
     Free now, McCarthy towed us into sixty feet of water where it was too deep for the swells to break. Anchored again on the port anchor, we rode up and down like on a hobby horse but were relieved not to be taking green water on board. Looking back, we saw Elvis, the steel drum musician jump into the surf and hand our dinghy up to the good people on the roadway, and were relieved when they carried it around behind Schooner's building.



     We watched swells continue to come around the point and roll into the anchorage with curling graybeard tops. As they raced across the water off of Schooners, where we had been anchored with no engine, they broke and dashed themselves to death on the stone wall of the roadway.



     Swells were also breaking on all the shores around Admiralty Bay. Boats anchored along Lower Bay were struggling to move into deeper water. One unattended sailboat was knocked down with his mast in the water and half filled with seawater by a breaking wave.
     All day we pitched up and down on the swells and rolled from side to side, still with no wind.


    

     An anchored sailboat with a screaming lady crew was rolling from side to side -- can you see her masts, first to the left then to the right.

    
     A catamaran had power and, pitching green water right there in the harbor, finally got out of the trap and motored past the moon rocks to get on the south side of the island where we heard on the VHS radio the seas were flat. Oh, for a working engine.

    

    

     A boat that we had watched being rebuilt by the local craftsmen was completely destroyed. The fuel dock that serviced the boats was gone and we wondered where the fuel tanks were.
    
     The protective seawall in front of Schooner's Bar was washed away but our dinghy was safe. We learned later that they also recovered our 15 hp dinghy engine and clamped it on a barrel and ran fresh water through it to rinse out the salt water.

     And the seawall that had protected the houses boardering the north side of the bay lay crumbled.

     The next morning, when a new day was born, we looked around and saw the stone wall had given itself to save Schooners Restaurant and several houses close by lay in humbled, tumbled heaps of rock and cement. We realized, with grateful hearts, that, but for the good people of Bequia, Spaceship would have been carried ashore, holed, sunk, and be lying dismasted, a tragedy, in that row of rubble.
     A week later the mutilated dinghy was patched and holding air and our outboard engine planed us around the anchorage so we could examine the damage to boats.
     On shore and walked the little town. The whalebone bar had four feet of sand in its yard and two feet covering the floor around the spinal whale bone seats.

What was wrong with Hurricane Lenny?




    
     Hurricane Lenny plowed across the Caribbean in the wrong direction. Most hurricanes move east to west, but Lenny was on the upper lip of a huge high on northern South America which had west to east winds in the Caribbean and carried Lenny eastward.

     As it plodded along the central winds blew well over 100 gusting to 160. Lenny was a type 5 hurricane, the worst. Storms at sea always radiate swells, like dropping a big rock in a pond, Lenny was a big rock.
     Storm swells can be felt miles away and books have been written on how predict the strength and distance to the storm. It may have been predicted that there would be a norther which is the name given to huge swells that come down from the north and impact on the South American coast.
     But we were in a protected harbor, right? -- wrong!
     Since the first swells were generated when Lenny was far to the west, the leading swells were travelling more eastward than they ever had impacted the Windward Islands and the intial swells entered our anchorage which was open to the west and set an all time record.
     Compass newspaper published our story in which we expressed our thanks for the help the locals gave to save our boat from the wrath of the sea.

THE TRADEWINDS BECKONED!




    

     The tradewinds began to blow so we retrieved our boat parts from Mr. Fixit and put our diesel engine back together. Tyrone Caesar tuned our diesel engine, which was running better than ever, so we decided to venture north on the Caribbean side of the Windward Islands to see if there was any destruction.

LITTLE DID WE KNOW!




    
     When we sailed north in 2000() we were appalled at the ruins.
     Between the two pitons of St. Lucia the heliocopter landing was gone, washed away.

     Because there was no wind, anything back of fifty feet was untouched, but structures along the beach were severely damaged.
    

    
     St Lucia before and after
    

    

    
     Beach washed away in front of St. Lucia hotels.
    

    
     On up the Lesser Antillies.

     Along the coast of Martinique where Mt. Pele once blew.

    

All that from hurricane waves but no wind.




    
    

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