After a couple days of inspecting everything, we can now say we had no damage to the boat at all from hurricane Dorian. As mentioned in the previous post, our dock had a little damage, but even that was relatively minor. In the two days after the storm we drove around town in addition to following our usual running and walking routes. There was barely any evidence of a rain shower, much less a hurricane.

At the height of the storm, our marina had 18 hours of sustained winds of 35mph with 65mph gusts. These wind conditions were actually worse than hurricane Irma 2 years ago which did far more damage both to our marina and the city. The difference was the position of the storm. Dorian passed us to the east as a category 2 hurricane and Irma went by to the west (same distance from us as Dorian) as barely a category 1. The strongest winds from Dorian came out of the north and northwest and were diminished by the northward movement of the storm and blocked somewhat from traversal over land. The strongest winds from Irma came out of the south and southeast and were made even stronger by the storm’s northward movement. Those Irma winds were unblocked by any land and had an open fetch from the ocean.

The town of St. Augustine was also much better prepared this time as it had undergone numerous adaptations after both Matthew (2016) and Irma (2017). More of the utility lines are now buried underground, many homes and businesses have been “jacked-up” off the ground to avoid being flooded by storm surge, and clay tiles have replaced asphalt shingles on roofs that were damaged in the prior storms. Also, erosion protection measures were installed on various parts of the area beaches which helped a lot.

We were very fortunate.