It didn’t take very long into the hurricane season to experience our first tropical storm as live-aboards. Andrea has given us the proper initiation by bringing her winds and rains to the west coast of Florida. As I write this, I am sitting at our salon table, bobbing up and down and swaying right and left. Cindy has just gone below to lie down to prevent queasiness. I feel like I’m riding one of those mechanical bulls. In actuality, hasn’t been all that bad. I’ve had to reposition/resecure a couple of lines, but other than that, we’ve had no problems (except for one leaky hatch). I’ve yet to double up any of my dock lines, which I must do as soon as possible in preparation for any other tropical storms, hurricanes, or even strong thunderstorms. That’s on the priority to-do-list.

Andrea, with a quite well-defined eye for a tropical storm

Looking forward out our salon window

Water coming up over the dock

Re-securing the port bow line

At this point, Andrea, with sustained winds of 60 mph, is close to making landfall north of us. Most of the rain has moved off to the east. There were several tornadoes in the area this morning, but we were fortunate to have no damaging winds at the marina. The winds here were probably sustained around 30 mph with gusts in the 40s range. Our high tide was a couple of feet higher than usual. We saw water splashing up over the dock for the first time. However, the tornado threat is now lessened and the worst is behind us. Thanks to all our friends and family for their prayers and concerns.

Andrea’s wind

Cindy braving the storm

Today is my day off, so I’ve been able to be with Cindy on the boat. It’s been a stay inside, stay dry kind of day. If the bouncing around isn’t too bad, I plan to make some Shrimp Scampi with Angel Hair Pasta for dinner this evening.

Below is my first attempt at video editing using iMovie. I’ve got a lot to learn and plenty of room for improvement, but I’m happy with this first attempt. The video itself was shot well after the worst of the storm had passed. I mainly filmed it to show the bouncing of the boat and as an excuse to practice my video editing. Cindy says the movement is far worse than is shown in the video. It is actually quite an experience watching the video of the boat move while the boat is moving. You’re not sure what is real and what is virtual!