Greetings,

Just a quick update to bring you up to speed on what we did/accomplished yesterday.

The good news is Dream Away, has no issues and is in great shape. The bad news is the marina in which we live, Watergate, is a disaster, and it will probably be a long time before we have water and power.

We drove down to Clear Lake Shores from Spring to check out Dream Away. The drive down was no problem at all. It was pretty obvious by looking at the damage, or lack of it, that for us hurricane Ike was a surge event and not a huge wind event. The drive down was uneventful, but once we got to our Marina things changed. The marina was in very bad shape.

The first thing we did was check out our second car, the Nissan Altima. It did have water in it, because the seats were very wet. When we tried to start it, there was nothing. As we were leaving the marine in the afternoon, I attempted to start it again with a jump from the Suburban, but it still did not start. The starter spun and engaged and seemed to work, but the engine did not start. I may be able to save it, but we shall see.

All of the floating piers survived without a problem. Most of the boats that were tied to the floating piers also survived without a problem. The fixed piers, which are made of wood, did not do so well. The pier on which we live is on the west side of the marina. It is a "U" shaped pier, that surrounds the pool and bath house. Just behind the bath house is the parking lot. There are actually two piers in the "U", pier 4 and pier 18. All of the boats on our two piers were floating. Some had bad damage, one boat was sitting up on the dock, and some had gotten off with very minor damage. Dream Away was one of those.

The dock and finger pier around Dream Away was still in good shape. One of the pilings at the back on the port side had snapped off, and was jamming the boat up against the finger pier. We went down below and all was in great shape, everything was dry and looked good. The refrigeration was working fine. The batteries were down, so I opened the seacock for the generator, started the generator and ran it for about five hours to charge up the batteries.

While the batteries were charging, I got the boat next to me secured. Both of the pilings behind them were broken off, so that was a lot of fun. After that boat was secured, I was able to get the broken piling off of Dream Away, and she was floating free again. I took off all of the extra lines and got the boat cleaned up. Also did some work on a couple of neighbors boats that needed some attention.

The docks in our area were pretty torn up. lots of boat owners will not be able to get to their boats because of that.

Overall we did very good, and most of the people we know personally at Watergate did very good. There is some damage, but most of the damage is cosmetic, and will not even be worth an insurance claim because of the deductible. With most Yacht policies the deductible doubles during a named storm.

We are not sure exactly what we will do, but we will have a plan in a couple of days. We will have no problem living on the boat, because we can jerry jug in water and diesel. The real problem will be sewerage. With no power in the marina, the pump out will not work, and the service we hire may be down for a very long time.

So we did fine, even our storage had no problem. I will try and get some pictures up on the web page today, but Internet service and cell service is still an up and down thing. I will also try and get all of the emails responded to today that have come in from friends and family.

I want to thank all of you for all of your prayers, good wishes and positive thoughts.

regards,

jimk

Member Seven Seas Cruising Association

WEB page http://www.dreamaway.net