Hurricane Erin Was a Massive Near Miss

Hurricane Erin is a massive hurricane currently marching north offshore from the Eastern Seaboard. Luckily the giant hurricane appears to have threaded itself through the islands without scoring a direct hit on any landmass. James Lane, of the Baba 30 Cetacea, moored in Red Hook, St. Thomas, wrote in with some of the excitement from the near miss.

Hurricane Erin, at this writing, is still a great big son of a bitch. It reached Cat 4 status just as it was spanking over the Virgin Islands late Saturday/early Sunday morning, about 1 a.m. local time. Dena and I have A-Things we do to ready the boat for a hurricane, so we “storm-dressed” Cetacea the day before we got hit, and dude, we were tight. In Red Hook Harbor off St. Thomas, USVI, we are also protected from the north, the south and the west, so we were very fortunate this time around. Don’t get me wrong; it was intense and rough as hell but we sustained no damage, and the boat handled herself quite well. Believe me, it was hot and sticky down below during the all-night, torrential rains, which was most of the storm, but you know, this ain’t our first ….

Speaking of!

A late-model Bavaria 36 (sailboat) came into the anchorage just before sunset the day of the storm and tried to grab a mooring, to no avail. They ended up short-scoping their anchor upwind of us, then — I’m not kidding — got into their dinghy and rode into town. The boat broke loose shortly thereafter, missed us astern by about 50 feet, and took off out to sea. I did a non-emergency call (a pan pan) on the VHF radio and was answered by one of our catamaran neighbors, and they went out in their dinghy and saved some other “sailor’s” boat by (I later found out) paying out more scope on a boat heading out to sea in a hurricane.

The boat’s companionway was locked; that’s why they ended up emergency-anchoring the boat in the middle of the ferry channel (really big deal, folks!) again, and I can’t stress this enough: in the middle of a hurricane. That is where the boat stayed for almost 24 hours, and her saviors did not identify themselves on VHF. Ultimately, some dude in an inflatable went out to the boat and motored it away. That was the most exciting thing that happened on Cetacea during Hurricane Erin, the first real hurricane of 2025. The island of St. Thomas, of course, flooded everywhere, and our internet was totally off all day after the storm, but hey, we did OK!