This rather ominous picture was taken two hours before high tide on October 29, 2012 at the Monmouth Boat Club in our headquarters town of Red Bank, New Jersey. The center of Sandy is still about 10 hours away. The river is the Navesink River and it is an estuary that enters New York Harbor at the Raritan Bay right behind Sandy Hook. While it looks bad, since 1875 the club has been modified a number of times to allow storm tides to wash in and wash out rather uneventfully. The water level is not up to the lower sill of the window to the right of the main entrance and therefore it has not yet beaten the record set in 1990.
We’ll see where it stops. Let’s hope New York City is as well prepared as MBC. As mariners we know that being prepared is what it comes down to. Once the storm hits you can only say: Let’s be careful out there.
Wednesday Update:
I posted this blog before the storm hit. The water ended up reaching the top of the window frames, so a new record was set by a sizeable margin.
The building survived although the water did affect our high mounted electricals. What we had not counted on was that our floats (note one stack on the right side of the picture) went for a float around the river. By Wednesday afternoon most of the floats had been found. Monmouth Boat Club will be fine, but the carnage at the many marinas in our area is another story. The power in the office came back on today and tomorrow we will be hard at work. Hopefully we will find enough gas for all the driving from marina to marina.
