If you keep a sailboat in the water in a hurricane prone area, you need to have emergency gear on board to save your boat if a storm hits.
The first step in your hurricane plan should be to have a list of everything that is necessary to evacuate your boat and to make sure these things are on board before hurricane season arrives. You will need full tanks of fuel for your auxiliary engine, fuel for your cooking stove, drinking and cooking water, food and snack supplies for the time underway when evacuating, and such supplies as batteries and spare parts for all important systems on board. You should have the boat ready for a trip of at least a week, because after a hurricane hits an area, it is often impossible to return to the marina for several days in the aftermath.
With these basic supplies on board, you now need to think about how you will secure your boat in the storm. Even far inland, you may experience extremely strong winds that will tear your boat loose from your standard anchor. You should have on board no less than four anchors of the appropriate size for your boat. Ideally, one of these should be a greatly oversized storm anchor to set in the direction of the strongest expected wind. The anchors should be of different designs. Some are best for mud bottoms, some for sand bottoms and some for rock. Be sure you have all that you need for your boating area.
Each anchor should be accompanied by its own dedicated anchor rode, consisting of appropriately-sized nylon rope or chain, or a combination of both. If your boat does not have an adequate number of sufficiently strong cleats for securing all these anchors, be sure and install them before a hurricane threatens. All cleats and deck hardware should be reinforced with backing plates under the deck. Hurricane force winds often tear hardware out of the decks of improperly equipped boats.
In addition to the anchors and rodes you have on board, you should have several extra long lengths of heavy nylon line for securing your boat to trees and other solid objects. These lines cannot be too long. You never know how close you can get to such objects. I suggest carrying four such lines at least 200 feet long for a hurricane evacuation. You will also need anti-chafing gear, which you can make yourself, for all these lines and anchor rodes. Anti-chafing gear is anything you can wrap around the line where it is tied to a deck cleat or passes through a deck chock and is susceptible to chafing through. Many boats are lost in hurricanes because the lines chafe through and part in this way. Make chafing gear out of strips of leather or pieces of rubber hose that will fit over the line and protect it from abrasion at these critical points.
The most important thing you need to remember when thinking about hurricane preparations is to act early. These items should be a part of your vessel's essential gear. Don't make the mistake of waiting until a hurricane is forecast to hit to go out and shop for anchors and extra line. The shelves of marine and hardware stores will be cleaned out by all the less-prepared boaters in the area buying all this stuff up in a panic.
