So here we are again, in the southeast on the precipice of peak hurricane season.

Despite hopes and wishes, not only did the season not get rescheduled due to COVID – it seems like the months ahead are shaping up to be a doozy with nearly double the number of predicted storms.

At this point, shrugging your shoulders and saying ‘what else can you expect – it’s 2020’ seems like the only reasonable response.

If You Can Be Anywhere – Why the Southeast for Hurricane Season?

We’re definitely no novices at navigating the season. I moved to the east coast of Central Florida back in the mid 1990s, and have dodged my fair share.

In fact, it was the 2004 active season that got me into RVing – I bought my first while riding out my 3rd mandatory evacuation inside of a couple months (sight unseen on eBay no less).

My little pop-up camper was intended to be a hurricane evacuation escape pod, and possible temporary housing if my sticks-and-bricks was damaged.

It never came to that, and instead I began enjoying visiting Florida State Parks and fell in love with the RVing lifestyle.

And then I met Chris, who had already hit the road in a little camper – and the rest is history. 14 years later – we still live a mobile lifestyle by boat and RVs.

We return to the southeast, particularly Florida, quite often. After all, we have family here – and family is core to our happiness.

And heck, Florida really isn’t that bad of a place to be for summer. Sure, it gets hot and humid – but particularly coastal, the breezes make it much more temperate. More so than some places we’ve found ourselves for summer, like say the midwest. Or Arizona.

And if you give me the choice of any natural calamity – I’ll choose hurricanes over earthquakes, tornados or wildfires. At least hurricanes come with warning.

And if you track them closely enough, you have plenty of time to execute your hurricane plan.

So for us, the risks of the season remain worth the while.

Hurricane Approach: RV vs Boat

There are however differences in the way we approach our hurricane plan between boat and RV.

Which we addressed last weekend as we awaited Tropical Storm / Hurricane Isaiah in this live video broadcast:

General Tips

Things that are the same between our approach with our different vessels include:

Keeping our fuel tanks full – so we’re always prepared and not rushing during storm preps. And keeping water & holding tanks at their optimal levels.  We also reduce the amount of ‘stuff’ we keep outside and have to secure for a storm.

But the key thing we do is stay hyper aware and actively track storms. This time of year, scanning these resources is a daily occurrence:

• National Hurricane Center — The official projected path, assembled from several modeling systems.
• Tropical Tidbits — Levi Cowan is a PhD meteorologist, and puts out his excellent analysis of storms in YouTube videos and renders his own modeling.
• Windy — This app and website beautifully display
• WeatherNerds — A great collection of weather tracking tools and ensemble modeling.
• Mikes Weather Page — Another great collection of weather tracking tools.

RVing and Hurricanes

As we discuss during the video – RVs are excellent escape pods. Self contained, fairly nimble and able to react quickly to changing hurricane predictions.

So when RVing in the area, we keep alert and pretty much plan to leave the area for any named storm predicted to impact our area.

It’s just not worth the risk otherwise.

The Escapees RV Club asked us to write an article on the subject for them. That post is now live, in which I share more tips on successfully navigating the season:

RVing During Hurricane Season: Hurricane Prep for RVers

Boating & Hurricanes

When RVing our plan is generally to use our wheels and get out of the way – that’s not always true of boating.

When you choose to boat in the southeast, you just accept a certain level of risk with hurricanes. And you select your insurance plan accordingly.

Since we bought our boat in 2017, we have spent every year in the zone.

Aside from getting far north (really north – Isaias last week had impacts even in New Hampshire!), there’s really just no escaping possible impacts.

You have to stay aware, have a plan and be good with the outcome.

There are three general approaches we see boaters take:

• They haul the boat out for the season and do something else (like RV).
• They plan to secure their boat in place and either ride the storm out on board … or evacuate on land.
• They try to outrun storms.

  

We honestly kinda play it by ear each season.

Our first season in 2017, we actively cruised. We were complete boating novices. We ended up in the Keys for Irma with no clear path which way to head to attempt to get out of the path. So we opted to secure in place and evacuate on land by our RV stored nearby.  We also rode out a couple smaller storms out onboard – finding marinas to tie up at.

Our second season, we took a longer term slip in an area considered more of a hurricane hole in Jacksonville – with the option to run up the St. Johns River or ICW if needed.

That year, we had no direct storms to deal with – but having a slip secured brought us more tranquility.

Last season, we ended up hauling out in Savannah as Hurricane Dorian threatened the area – and started our RVing season early. While we could have re-launched and resumed cruising, the reduced stress of not worrying about the next storm was comforting.

Now that we’re no longer complete novices, we consider outrunning a storm to be unrealistic for us in many cases. Boats just don’t move fast enough to keep up with what can be a quickly shifting storm path. And there are just limited options to run.

Instead, we always keep aware of what our local options are if a storm is approaching. Sure, moving out of a firm path might make sense in some cases – but it’s not the default reaction we started out with.

Our Plans This Year

So, that brings us back to this year.

As the pandemic enveloped us all back in March, we opted to head back to Sanford, Florida . We knew any quarantine would place us entering hurricane season, so our selection to shelter in place was also based around where would be safer for storm protection.

While being 40 miles inland doesn’t exempt us from impacts of storms, it should at least minimize them as opposed to being coastal.

We’ll play each storm by ear, and we have our camper van in the parking lot ready to evacuate in if needed.  Last week’s storm gave us a great dry run at executing our preparation plans.