Crazy!

This evening, we got to see an amazing lightning show. I thought it was a lot of heat lightning, more than I'd ever seen.

It turns out it was more than that, about an hour after we went to bed, I was hearing thunder. So Fowler and I headed out to batten things down (no storms had been predicted, so we hadn't prepared), we could feel wind picking up. After the few minutes it took to secure everything, a storm had come up: Fowler and I were soaked.

We stood in our pilot house, listening as the rains fell, the winds kept increasing, and the hail was plinking off the hatches. We heard our dock lines stretching as the winds pushed us as far from the dock as they would let us get. Mom and Dad had come up to offer help. It was quite a storm!

Then as quickly as it had come up, the winds started to die down, rain let up, and FORTUITOUS was no longer stretching her dock lines. We waited a long while, to be sure we really were secure, and the storm died down.

Everyone went back to bed, it was now probably 2 AM. I lingered, not able to settle down. There was still lightning flashing in the distance, and it would light up the bay. I looked out the window, and saw, lit up by a flash, a houseboat 50' off our beam. As my mind tried to process this (did I really just see a boat) I called to Fowler. He didn't come right away, and I called again, when I realized it indeed was a houseboat, adrift, floating toward us! Uh oh!

Sparing the details, we were able to fend it off, then get it to the dock behind us and secure it. There was no one on the boat, I suppose they are in for a big surprise soon, because I don't know where it came from.

I will say this: seeing that boat out the pilothouse windows, lit up only by flashes of lightning, will go down as one of the freakiest sights in my lifetime!