November 2015 to October 2016 A Year in Review

Because we had an interrupted sailing season this year, there have been no updates.  We returned to Boca Chica in the fall of 2016, sailing south , uneventfully with buddy boaters, Luke and Jan Sand.
Winter in Key West brought another January Wreckers Race win. January seems to be our lucky month for the Wreckers Race. We also had our usual complement of visitors. This time the Peters and the Malotts paid us a visit.

Spring cruising suffered from several interruptions. The first interruption was  a fabulous Atlantic crossing shipboard cruise with marina friends, followed by a land tour of France, Italy, and Spain, primarily with Jose and Char Pagan, sailing friends who are now land traveling buddies as well. The final interruption was due to family health issues, which caused us to sprint back to South Carolina aboard Wind Dancer and fly to Illinois.
.Home in Dataw for the summer, we managed some day sails, including a day with children and grandchildren exploring the Morgan River.

Disaster struck in October in the form of Hurricane Matthew. We had company visiting, Kit and Tom Gunn, who had arisen at 3 am to catch an early morning flight to Savannah. We arrived back at Dataw and had just finished lunch when the announcement came for a mandatory evacuation, Hurricane Matthew had taken an unexpected turn toward us! I drove the Gunns back to the Savannah airport, while Rick raced down to get Wind Dancer on the schedule to be taken out of the water the next morning. We were the last boat to be pulled from the water. Don't know know the full story, but when Matthew arrived 2 days later, 26 boats went down with the marina. Years of neglect by the current owners and powerful wind and waves pummeling the dock from the northeast,  across the open expanse of marshland from the St. Helena Sound, caused the violent breakup of the docks. Two heavily damaged boats survived on a small piece of intact dock. The rest were sunk or carried into yards or miles away onto the airport runway. Maybe a half dozen boats were able to be repaired. The rest were lost and our marina gone.

We left for Key West three weeks later.our journey down was uneventful, but we did not realize that our blissful winters in Key West were nearing their end.