PDQ OWNERS FORUM

Wishing all PDQ owners residing in Florida the best of luck with the Hurricane!

Amen, please let us know how you did!

Diva Di is moored behind our canal home. Lots of surge will be an issue for sure. If the house is flooded, the boat will be the least of our worries.

Thanks for the good wishes; we need them.

Gusto is triple tied in her slip at St Petersburg Yacht Club. It will be a miracle if she survives. Sad.

Bob MacNeill

We are on the east side of Florida, not expecting more than Cat 1 conditions and minimal tide surge. Our thoughts to all of those on the west side of the state. We will hope for a miracle for all of you.

We are in Stuart now and have pumps, generators, tools and materials to help out if needed.
Be safe.
James
772-678-2268

Best wishes from another member of the west coast PDQ group. We hope everyone in the storm's path can ride it out with as little damage and disruption as possible.

Hope everyone is okay, waiting to hear more news.

We are in Palm Coast, Fl and keep our boat behind the house in a canal. We had a relatively unpleasant night. Lots of wind, 10" of rain, about a 4.5' tide surge, lost a few shingles and no power. We are lucky. I hope all of those in other parts of Florida maybe out ok.

Diva Di in Punta Gorda got very lucky, although I have yet to do more than a quick, exterior inspection. We left our evacuation home 10 miles inland on Mon (day after storm) to check out our home and boat and found very little damage to structures (even pool cage screens). The only apparent damage we saw of significance were some trees down and old billboards torn up. Of course, this is only what we could see along our route back home. Some traffic signals are not working properly and a few streets were flooded with one or more feet of water.

Our canal neighborhood came through very well with no apparent damage to homes or boats. I had just recently installed slidemoors on new concrete pilings. I was not worried about the loads on the pilings or mooring system, but was worried about the water level changes (negative and positive) exceeding the roughly 8 foot travel of the slides. From verbal reports, our canal water "emptied out" but some canals are quite deep in the middle, so that can't be true. It is probably true that most boats were sitting on the bottom for a bit. With our shallow draft and normal low tide depth at the dock, I am pretty sure the slides would reach the lower limit at least a few feet before the boat hit the soft bottom. Again, I don't know if that occurred.

The water never got higher than the seawall, so we had at least 1.5 feet to spare on the upper travel limit. Slidemoor recommends removing the bolts that act as stoppers on the top side, to allow the slides to come off the tracks if the water gets that high. The problem is how do you control the boat at that point. Many of us have slidemoors because there is just not enough piling structure around us to cross tie the boat. It would not be a good thing, to be sure.

Our town got very lucky with both wind and surge. Irma lost a lot of intensity after landfall south of us in Marco Island as the eye stayed over the land for the most part. It hit as a strong Cat 3 and got to us as a mid-level Cat 2 (big difference). The exact path of the eye prevented the possibly large surge that could have flooded our homes. Even 1 foot of water in a home is a big deal.

We had a lot of major inconvenience to prep for the storm, and will have all that and more getting the house back to normal at some point, but we are traveling north for a week soon so will leave it all in place.

Here's hoping to get similarly good reports from the others on this list.

Same here with Lady of the Lake in Punta Gorda Isles...we did our best to secure her, anchors off bow and stern along with our TideSlides and additional lines tied to trees in case the TideSlides or the pilings they are attached to failed. Honestly, we left her thinking there was a good chance she might not survive if things got too crazy. We must have left enough scope on the slides to allow her to sit on the bottom because all indications upon return is that she did very well. No indication of stress on her from the change in water level. Only thing I have seen so far is that she must have banged around a lot in the wind since all of the cabinet doors inside were swung open, although very little of the contents had been disturbed...Gina and I feel very lucky with this one and feel terrible about the damage sustained in the islands, Cuba, Key West, and south of us in Marco and Naples, etc and hope they can get well soon...

We keep Flexible Flyer in Burnt Store Marina, Punta Gorda. A few days ago this was directly in the cross hairs of a very dangerous storm. Without boring anybody with our options and preparations I'll just say Catherine was working in Poland and I evacuated to a vacant house in Alva. As I sat in the dark with our two cats and only a candle for illumination my phone rang. The owners of Magic who we met at last year's rendezvous were calling to check on us. Right out of the blue! Stressful situations have a way of amplifying just about everything, including emotions, but I want to say how touched I was by this demonstration of concern.

We are located in Cape Coral , Florida and keep Island Time in a canal behind our house, We were extremely lucky, Not a scratch on the boat although we did prepare her for this, There was a lot more damage to the east of us where the eye went through, Hope everyone was as fortunate as us.

Rising Tide is alive and well at Ortega River Marina in Jacksonville.

Kent & Jane Overbeck
2005 PDQ 34

David Doyle would like to report that "Miss My Money" survived the storm just fine. She rode it out at Ortega Landing in Jacksonville.