Surviving Hurricane Marty

So here I am, stuck in a hotel room writing this instead of out diving. Why?, you ask. Good question, have you heard of Hurricane Marty? Well I know way too much about it.

The story starts with a full days flying to get to LaPaz, Portland Oregon to Salt Lake City, to Los Angeles, to Hermesillo, to Laredo, to LaPaz, I left at 6am on Friday Sep 12 and arrive at 8:30 that evening, so I’m a bit tired. I check into the Hotel Los Arcos, with my gear, one dive bag weighing 70 lbs, a pelican case, a roll around and camera bag. Its hot out but I feel like a bite of my favorite Mexican food, tacos con pescado, or fish tacos. Trouble is, none of the street side stands that are open have pescado, so I’m stuck eating at a place down the street, oh well, my favorite taco stand will be open mañana. The boat doesn’t leave until Monday morning so I have some time to kill. Over the next two days I meet other divers who are going out on the boat also, they are trickling in through Sunday and finally Sunday night we board the boat to spend the night for an early departure of 7am. Whoops, the A/C fails during the night and the temp and humidity are excessive, so I don’t get much sleep and end up dragging my pillow up to the top deck and catch a couple z’s on a deck chair.

Well it turns out to be a great trip, the A/C problem was just dock power and it works at anchor, the dives are awesome, huge schools of fish, great topography, warm water, really good food (even fish tacos for lunch one day). My RB is working fabulously and I log about 21 hours of diving in the first week out. The boat heads back to port to let off the first week group, but I have signed up for two weeks and get a hotel room for Sat night, again running into divers who are coming in for the next weeks trip. On Sunday the van comes and picks us up for the short ride to the marina where the Don Jose is moored, I am riding with 4 ladies from Chicago who have come to dive the warm tropical waters of the Cortez de Mar and after they stow gear and I move my stuff over one room we all decide to head out for dinner. The sky is overcast and the wind is picking up, the dive master Peter tells me of a rumor of a possible storm heading our way. It was way south of Los Cabos and heading west out to the pacific which was fine with me but fickle fellow that he was, Marty changed course and headed north, intent on screwing my second week of vacation.

During dinner the wind picked up some more and then the rain started to fall, we scrambled to get inside the covered area of the restaurant. Outside the wind is blowing harder and the rain is coming down. We figure that we are just catching the edge of the storm as it continues west, but how wrong we all were.

Back at the boat around 9 pm we are all just hanging out getting to know everyone else. There is a couple from Switzerland, the four from Chicago, Alan and Patty who also stayed on from last week, Patty’s friend Tammy, and my friend Curtis from Seattle who shows up late, as usual, but the common thread is we are all ready to go diving. (Curtis has never dived in warm water, only in the PNW in 45 deg water, he is really looking forward to this.)

The wind is picking up more and the rain is coming down in sheets, the tropical storm is now upgraded to a hurricane and is named Marty and it is coming directly for us, no ifs ands or buts, we are its target. The weather becomes steadily worse all through the night and few of us get any sleep at all. I walk around the boat about midnight, although its blowing and raining hard, its not anything I haven’t seen before. I look around and see boats tied well but straining at their tethers in the wind and waves. The Don Jose is tied well and really isn’t moving much. I head back to bed and fall asleep, no stranger to a rocking boat, as I live on mine year round.

About 3:30 in the morning, Curtis wakes me up and tells me that I need to look outside. I already hear a major difference in the wind but stumble to the door to look out. The wind is not blowing any more, it is howling, growling like a mad dog and the rain is coming down more horizontally than vertically, the boats around us are pulling hard against the docks and one is already missing, torn from its mooring and blown away across the bay onto the rocks. This is something that you just cant get a grip on unless you are in the middle of it, TV news cannot do it justice. I step outside and walk forward to look over the front of the Don Jose, the mast of the closest sailboat is rocking fore and aft, tracing an arc of over 90 degrees, the wind is coming at the Don Jose from the starboard side, but I’m on the port side so I’m protected and hardly getting wet, but I made the mistake of stepping out in front of the superstructure and was instantly soaked to the skin, I couldn’t look into the wind because the rain was hitting me so hard it hurt, I went for my video camera, already secure inside its underwater housing.

Here is a bit of the video I took.

Marty video

The night continued to howl and the rain was like shotgun pellets coming in from the east, the crew scurried around tightening lines and looking for trouble, but the boat held strong, pushed about 7 feet away from the dock by wind. Other boats were getting beat against the docks and some were taking on water at an alarming pace, it wasn’t looking good. By 4:30 the owner of the Baja Expeditions, Tim Means and some more employees showed up intending to unload us and take us to the hotel for the night, but with the wind and the rocking of the boat, still 7 feet away from the dock, it seemed to be a daunting task at best. Some of us felt like the boat was an ok place to stay, it wasn’t getting beat up like any of the others around and it was moored to a pier that was on cement pilings down through the water into the bottom, very solid. The decision was made to get off the boat and the crew and divemasters made fast a line from the stern of the boat over to the sea wall and another line with a float on it to pull folks across the dark, debris filled water. One young lady was on the verge of panic but did a great job of following direction, life jackets on, we started sending the women across. Peter was in the water swimming alongside the female passengers as they held onto the float and were pulled to relative safety at the sea wall, where they could climb up onto land. I was on the swim platform helping them down the ladder to sit on the platform before slipping off into the churning sea, I had put my wet suit on earlier and had my scuba mask on backwards in case I needed to go in to help Peter. We got three women off the boat, I think it was Suzy, Yvonne and Michelle and JoAnn was on deck to go across when the wind just stopped, a light rain was still falling and the boat slowly drifted back to the dock, several crew grabbed the lines and pulled it closer, and all the passengers got off and headed for the comfort of the van that was waiting to take us to the hotel. We were in the eye of a hurricane. Things got confused as folks who only had some very bare necessities wanted back on the boat to gather more things to take. Alan and Peter ran back and forth getting personal items while the wind was still. Marty was moving over us and the back side wasn’t far away.

The van evacuated us back to the Hotel Los Arcos and we were greeted with applause as we came up the steps, like a bunch of drowned rats soaked to the skin. Curtis and I both had wet suits on, seemed like the appropriate way to dress for a hurricane and we found ourselves retelling the story several times. Most everyone went to rooms and collapsed. Curtis and I decided to go look around, the sun was coming up and it was beginning to become light out, all around were dark clouds as the storm circled around, seeming to look at the destruction it caused, deciding whether to spare us or hit us again. We were out for about 30 minutes, taking some pictures and feeling very small looking at the power of Mother Nature when we saw the answer to our question, here comes Marty again. The wind began blowing again, this time from the opposite direction, even harder, if that was possible, and again the rain. We sought shelter in the entry way of the hotel and watched as more boats broke their moorings and drifted in to the rocks or beach, one small boat was visible and still floating, but in the next 5 minutes I looked back and it was gone, someone said that they saw it break in half and sink. I watched as another 35 foot power boat was dragging its anchor toward a concrete pier, there were two people on the boat, no way to get off, if it hit the pier it would go down for sure. I felt powerless to do anything. The streets were filled with brown muddy water, rushing downhill to the sea, while the sea was getting blown toward the streets, white caps and 5-6 foot waves crashing over the Esplanade, palm trees toppling over, their roots no longer able to hold them up against the force of the 100+ mph wind. There were several metal signs that were bent over by the wind and over a foot of water in the street, cars were still moving up and down the street, running to safety, there was really no where to go, but that didn’t stop them. Looking down the main street was the most awesome spectacle I have ever seen, all the trees still standing were loosing their fronds, the sea was overlapping the street and it looked more like a Hollywood movie than reality.

The back side of Marty continued to pound us for another hour, but its power was waning, its job done. LaPaz lay in ruins. We saw the Don Jose later and the starboard side looked like someone took a chain saw to it and the dock. When the wind turned around the boat almost climbed the dock, but other than cosmetic damage it survived in good shape. Glad we weren’t on it then. Trees down, signs mounted in concrete pulled from the ground, 30 feet of a cinder block wall fallen on two pickups, steel supports for a billboard twisted like they were made from straw, 60 boats sunk in and around the marina, not counting the little ones, docks and finger piers broken and floating free, some pulled over still attached to a sunk boat. The hotel was running on an auxiliary power generator and the water supply was shut off, the room Curtis and I were in had a 6 foot diameter puddle on the carpet by the door and a continual drip for the next two days, but at least we had a room. No outside lines for calls home, cell phones didn’t work, internet? Yeah right.

Its now Friday, and the storm was last Monday. The hotel is still rationing water, it only comes on 3 times a day for about an hour, schedule your bathroom time accordingly, including flushing the toilet. The airport started flying people out on Thursday, and the rest of my group left this morning. My flight leaves Sunday so I have another day to wait. The people of LaPaz are picking up the pieces quickly, services are back on and folks are going about their business almost like normal. It still seems a bit surreal to have survived a Category 2 hurricane in the tropics, winds were clocked at 150kph, 60 boats in the marina sunk, no report on the dollar (or peso) value lost here, two people dead. Somehow, missing my second week of diving isn’t a priority now, I’m happy to be here, safe, no one from our group was hurt and we all will remember for the rest of our lives, the day we met Marty.

Here are some images we recorded. Be patient, this will take a few moments to load, refresh your screen if some don’t come up.

Curtis took this picture of us just after evacuating the Don Jose.

The Eye of Marty.

Boat parts washed ashore.

To some, it was just a good time.

To others, it was a bit more serious.

Water in the street and signs torn from concrete mountings.

I saw more than 20 trees down.

A young girl looks down at her broken town.

Most of the streets that ran east west were flooded like this.

This was all beach the day before, now a boat graveyard. The reverse wind broke the mast of the left most sailboat.

Two boats that broke anchorages ended up against a seawall.

More boats on the same seawall. The below picture was off to the left of this beyond the man in the t shirt and black pants.

This is the restaurant we had dinner at Sunday night, now with a foot of filthy water inside it.

Curtis Nelson looks over a 30 foot cinder block wall that collapsed in the face of hurricane force winds. We spoke to the man who owned the ford pickup, he said, “Well my boat is still floating, but the day is still young” This was during the eye, before the storm hit us again, most of the boats that sunk did so on the reverse wind.

What’s left of a once strong billboard.

Two men walk by a sign altered by the wind.

Marty’s second punch, comes roaring in, this is less than 20 minutes after the above pictures were taken.

So much for Paradise Found. Moments before there was another small boat here, I never saw it again.

Looking down the street from the shelter of the hotel entryway.

It became difficult to see where the sea ended and the streets began.

The next day, below photos by Alan Studley.

This boat was a couple’s home…yesterday. This boat is the one in the video just in front of the Don Jose’s bow. There is a sail boat on this side of the broken dock that survived without a scratch, it was owned by a Robert and Josie, Divemasters with Baja Expeditions.

This one they managed to drag up on shore, I saw it on Thursday on dry dock.

So, this is my first, and hopefully my last, hurricane. The human spirit continues on in the face of adversity despite the odds. Dive safe.

Ron Micjan

LaPaz,

Baja California Sur

Mexico

September 26, 2003