After the catastrophic hurricane Beryl swept a path of destruction through the SE Caribbean last June, cruisers are rethinking their summer storage plans.
For cruisers weary from the arduous north/south run every season, many have been storing their boats in the Caribbean for the summer but with intensifying summer storms and increasingly restrictive insurance policies, the question of where to keep a boat during the off-season that will be safe from hurricanes.
Every summer many store their boats in the “zone” with the assumption that the odds are in their favor and that any given island is not likely to be hit by a strong storm more than perhaps once a decade.
From my perspective, those odds are not particularly good and I wonder, “would you walk across a busy street with a bag over your head if the odds of being struck and killed are only about one in ten?” I doubt that many would take those odds and yet assume that the risk of storm damage somehow seems less.
The devastation of the BVI and other islands in 2017 by Hurricane Maria and more recently last June in the SE Caribbean by Beryl will be hard to forget with so many losing their boats in areas that have traditionally been seen as fairly safe. Even those who left their boats in supposed “hurricane holes” did not fare well when Hurricane Beryl roared through.
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