Hurricane Watch in Nova Scotia ... Part 2

My friend Ken , whose family recently moved to the area from Vancouver, was interested in riding out Hurricane Earl with me, so the night before the storm was due to hit, he came aboard and Maggie went ashore to spend time with  Ken's wife (also name Margaret) and their four children.  Sophie stayed aboard because we figured that hurricane force winds buffeting the boat would be less traumatic than removing her from her favorite sleeping spots.

Earl was not expected to hit until the following midday, so the evening was pleasantly spent talking and watching movies.  I had a sound sleep but awoke early as the winds started to blow with Earl's approach.  Hubbard's Cove is tucked into a corner of St. Margaret's Bay, and H2OBO is moored near the mouth of the cove.  As the wind steadily increased we could see the waves marching across the cove entrance and breaking on the shore.  We only rolled a little as the waves fanned out from the point of land that marked the cove entrance.

Overnight, Earl had taken an eastward detour from the route he was originally expected to take.  Instead of making landfall in Yarmouth, he was travelling just off the southwestern shore, and it now looked as though he would hit near us somewhere in Lunenberg county, in which Hubbard's is situated .  We had on the local all-news radio station that seemingly had reporters posted all over Nova Scotia giving live updates of the hurricane with wind speeds, rainfall amounts, power outages, and fools getting swept into the ocean while watching the waves break on the rocks.  The seas out there were 7 to 10 meters high.

Around noon is when the action peaked.  H2OBO bucked in the wind and swung on its mooring but all remained secure.  I had one of the weather boards out so we could clearly see astern.  Every once in a while we would see the dinghy, which was tied to a stern cleat, get caught in a gust, rise up and flip over.  This happened about a dozen times,but no harm was done since the outboard engine was firmly mounted on its spot on the stern pulpit.

The eye must have passed very close by because there was a period when the winds diminished and the sky brightened followed after while by a return of the winds with equal intensity.

Apart from a few times when I mistakenly thought that we might have dragged our mooring, my only source of anxiety was the wind generator.  It is a Rutland 913, which I am very happy with in every respect.  It has a thermal switch which allows the rotor to freewheel in the event that the internal mechanism starts to overheat in high winds.
When this happened, the rotor spun so fast that I wondered how it did not break apart.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Earl, two boats in the cove broke free of their moorings and went ashore, power to over 200,000 people in the province went out, one person drowned somewhere while trying to secure their boat, many trees and branches snapped in the wind, and Sophie slept through most of it.  Maggie spent the time with her new friends enjoying their down-east hospitality, checking on Ken and me from shore, and playing games with the children by flashlight and candlelight.

H2OBO in Hurricane Earl

While at no time did I feel I was in any danger, I certainly felt alive.  And that was the end of Earl - our first named storm.