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Oriental’s Marinas > Sea Harbour Yacht Club

L

ate Sunday afternoon, Sea Harbour Yacht Club assistant dockmaster Lisa Thompson was almost jubilant about how well the boats there had fared in Irene. She’d spent a long day working along the docks, assessing things and had the stats at the ready, like a baseball box score. No boats lost, a few scratches, two bent stanchions, one rub rail pulled.

The main dock at Sea Harbour Yacht Club. Add about ten feet of water and no sign of most pilings and you’d have the scene that was there during Hurricane Irene’s storm surge on Saturday. The marina and its boats survived well.

The marina on Pierce Creek is in many places naturally protected, but Thompson says the northeast winds that pushed in the storm surge on Saturday came straight toward Sea Harbour’s main dock. The part of the dock that bore the first brunt of the surge lost one roughly 6 foot section. (Thompson noted that it had been nailed down rather than screwed on and so was more likely to come up.)

A section of the outermost dock at Sea Harbour Yacht Club came loose. Lisa Thompson noted that it had not been screwed in as the other portions were. The replacement will be.

Other than that, a loose board or two, or a curve in the dock, everything stayed intact. One rogue piling washed in from who-knows-where. All of Sea Harbour’s stayed where they’d been put.

No pilings came loose at Sea Harbour, says Lisa Thompson, but one rogue one drifted in and came to rest, after the surge, on one of the docks. Pine needles, swept from nearby — and far off — forests, were a common sight on the docks throughout the marina.

Thompson says she spent the hurricane in the safety of some friends’ home just across the creek and watched as the waters rose.. and rose … and rose. When she glanced at the marina’s back creek during the height of Irene’s surge, it took a moment to adjust her eyes. She saw nothing — nothing — at first and then looked up to where the boats were riding easily 10 feet higher than usual.

But the oddest scene, she says, played out at Sea Harbour’s main dock. Thompson on Sunday pointed to midway down the dock and one piling about a half a foot higher than the others around it. It’s 11 feet over the normal water level, she says, and that last half foot of it was the only bit of piling visible in the entire area at Irene’s peak surge. The rest of the scene was filled with the boats, in two orderly rows at their slips, fastened to their now invisible pilings…

Midway down this line of pilings at Sea Harbour is one that is about a half foot taller than the rest. It’s at 11 feet above normal water levels. It’s top 6 inches was the sole evidence of piling showing during Irene’s storm surge, says LIsa Thompson.

Double dock lines at Sea Harbour. Part of the plan for surviving a hurricane and its storm surge.

With such enormous forces of nature at play, how did the boats survive as well as they did? Asked if there was a secret, Lisa Thompson paused and then said, “I’m the ‘Hurricane Bitch.’”. A veteran of 8 hurricanes before Irene, she says she enforced a policy that all boats have double dock lines at each quarter and that spring lines be attached as well. She says she didn’t abide complaints — and she says there were some — about having to buy extra line. (It is for this reputation that we didn’t insist when she declined to have her photo taken…)

Thompson says she also insisted that she wanted boat owners to strip their boats of anything that could catch the wind. “I don’t want anything loose, “ she says. A look around on Sunday indicates that the policy worked.

Up and down the docks at Sea Harbour, double dock lines. Some boat owners survey the scene the day after Irene. The marina is discouraging visitors, even boat owners, because the ongoing electric outage means the sewage system can’t handle too much use.

Thompson says that during the hurricane on Saturday, she saw a boat at a private dock across from the marina held on with minimal lines until its owner swam out to it in the rising waters, climbed aboard, found some dock lines and secured the boat more firmly. If he hadn’t she says, the boat could’ve lurched free and done a lot of damage to the Sea Harbour vessels in their slips.

Roger Quillin of Raleigh came to check on his Beneteau, Morning Mist the day after. He’s kept his boat there for years and says, “so far, we’ve been lucky.” He was a bit apprehensive this time because for the first time in a long time, a boat was tied up at a private dock a short distance across from the creek from marina, rather close for comfort in a hurricane. (Lisa Thompson told him that at one point in the hurricane, that boat’s owner swam out to it and found more lines on the boat, and secured it. Had it gotten loose, other boats, including Roger’s could have been threatened.)

A bigger broom may be needed, but overall, says Lisa Thompson, Sea Harbour fared well in Irene.

At Sea Harbour Yacht Club, a tall oak fell.

On the porch at Sea Harbour. At the height of Irene’s storm surge, the water reached to the edge of that porch. At left is the upper reaches of the oak tree that fell in front of and to an extent, on, the clubhouse.

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Posted Thursday September 1, 2011 by Keith N. Smith