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Saturday, August 22nd, 2009, Martha's Vineyard,
Massachusetts
By Crystal Thune
In many ways, preparing for a storm on a boat is very similar to
how sports producers get ready for live events. There are only a
few known variables going in and what transpires is a result of
planning and acting on one's feet. For a live sporting event
such as a football game, a producer's set of knowns includes the
teams in action, the star players and franchise favorites, the
scheduled start time, the number of promotions he or she needs
to squeeze in, how many time outs each team has, etc. What the
producer does not know is who will win, who the heroes of the
day will be (maybe a franchise favorite; maybe a pine rider),
when he or she will get the promos in (maybe a guy goes down and
gets inured; maybe it's a key injury and story lines change),
when the teams will use their timeouts, etc. In our case, we are
going with knowns that are a little bit less certain than the
knowns going into a football game. What we've learned about
Hurricane Bill (and it's potential warpath) prompted us to scoot
out of Nantucket this morning in search of better anchorage.
Right now we are anchored in Katama Bay, a lagoon outside
of Martha's Vineyard. We made our move based on weather
forecasts, charts and discussions with Sky. We dropped three
anchors and are now waiting in anticipation for the arrival of
Bill. Hurricanes are by very nature unpredictable. Like live
sporting events, we can only go into the night prepared for what
we know and for what might happen. We are expecting the storm to
come around 2am with winds up to 40 knots. It may or may not
come. Either way, we will fall asleep tonight knowing we have
prepared Zia for all plausible scenarios. Hasta leugo amigos.
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