The boating community on St. Thomas and St. John was sucker-punched by Hurricane Otto, which lingered like an unwanted houseguest as a tropical depression all week.
The storm humbled a number of boaters with swells and wind that have driven boats onto beaches – some of them for a second time this season.
“It’s my own damn fault,” Scott Nye said. Nye’s boat, Silver Streak, was back up on the beach at Elephant Bay Wednesday after being hauled off less than a week ago.
During Hurricane Earl, Nye’s boat lost all three anchors and spent over three weeks on the beach before Sea Tow V.I. pulled the vessel off the sand and back into the water last week.
Without any anchors, Nye tied up to a mooring in Elephant Bay before this round of weather commenced.
“I went out to the mooring, and the storm came and took out the mooring,” Nye said. “I was not even [moved] back on the boat yet.”
Nye’s got a little luck on his side; he said the boat appears to remain undamaged even after its second beach foray.
Since Tuesday, more than seven boats are newly deposited on the beaches of St. Thomas and St. John, according to Sea Tow’s captain, Alan Wentworth. This is in addition to the dozen or so still beached since Hurricane Earl.
Otto seemed to catch a number of experienced boaters off their guard.
“It was just enough time after Earl for people to relax and then when they didn’t hear a hurricane with a name they just thought ‘this is just a small tropical storm, it’s not going to be anything’ and it caught us off guard,” Chuck Pessler said.
Pessler, whose boat was in an east-facing bay didn’t get any damage, but said he wasn’t as tuned into the weather that became Otto as he had been into Earl. “No one anticipated the amount of wind that we were going to have and also a lot of people who didn’t have boats with good [maintenance] or working bilge pumps – either the bilge pumps didn’t work or they couldn’t handle the capacity of all the rain – and some of the power boats sank.”
Otto’s tail developed over the Virgin Islands early in the week and instead of allowing local boaters to watch it approach and prepare as it came closer, it just showed up on the doorstep like a bad guest with dirty laundry.
“Seems like most of our storms go north and all the boats and bays and marinas are on the south side,” Pessler said. “So when it came out of the southwest it caught a lot of people unaware and since it wasn’t a named storm ‘til after it got past us it seemed like everyone thought it was just a small storm.”
Nye concurs and said he feels that the reason for the amount of damage was the direction of the swells, out of the south-southwest.
The swells certainly contributed to the beaching of the Nina, the hardworking dive boat of Aqua Action Dive Center in Secret Harbor on St. Thomas.
The 27-foot Burpee came ashore late on October 5, despite the four chains attached to three sandscrews and one engine block holding her in place, owners Sam Piscitello and Diane Gonda said.
Piscitello explained that when the swells started coming from the south-southwest, their direction created a sandbar too close to the boat, creating conditions that were rough enough to damage the lines holding the boat.
Normally, Piscitello said he’d move the boat into the mangroves for a named storm or weather with more than 25 knot winds predicted.
“It’s Otto now, but at the time it happened it was just a low pressure zone,” Piscitello said. He lifted up the shredded but thick pieces of rope that had held Nina. “The pennants from the mooring got sheared off. It was just too much for it.”
Thankfully Nina took a rock-free path to the beach, where she safely “vacuumed” herself into the sand, where she would be staying awhile, according to Sea Tow V.I.’s Chris Gagliardi.
“Sometimes you can actually hear the suction when you pull it off the sand,” Gagliardi said, making a kissing sound. “If we trouble it now we can cause more damage. It’s best to leave her here ‘til the weather calms down.”
Removing Nina will entail “bagging” or placing strong plastic bags under the stern and rudder, inflating them and then pulling her off using the combined horsepower of three or four of Sea Tow’s burliest vessels.
There isn’t any estimate yet of what it will cost to get the boat off the beach, but Gonda and Piscitello count themselves lucky. No one got hurt, there wasn’t any fuel spilled and they are insured, which will take care of the costs of getting Nina back to her job, and in the mean time, they have other boats at their disposal.
“We are open for business,” Gonda said. “We can still take people diving.”
