Creator
Jeanie Woodruff
Title
Our canal is in there somewhere...
Description
Saturday night was the worst (remember?), with tornado warnings alternating with flash flood warnings every 20 minutes, all night long. It was a Catch-22 -- we had to have our phones nearby so we could stay informed, but the constant warnings and non-stop, pounding rain kept us from getting any sleep. I know we weren't alone in that.
We finally gave up at 4:00 am, and got up to see what the water was doing behind our house (we live on a canal of Clear Lake). Even in the darkness, we could see that it had risen alarmingly since we'd gone to bed just a few hours earlier. Our sailboat seemed to be floating 10 feet away from the bulkhead, instead of right next to it, and it was tilting at a rakish angle. We could see that one of the corner lines was too tight and was pulling the boat down. We were going to have to do something quickly so the boat could right itself.
We threw on our rain gear and ran downstairs, but there was no way to get onto the boat...the water around it was too deep. We finally had the idea that we could get our extension ladder and string it from the bank to the boat, and then my husband could crawl across it to get onto the boat. This worked pretty well, although the boat (and therefore the ladder) was bobbing and swaying in the wind and pouring rain. It was pretty scary for me. When my husband got to the boat, he found that the too-tight line was so taut that there was no way he was going to get it untied, so he had to cut it loose. I was imagining the boat breaking completely free from its moorings in the rising water and blowing into one of our neighbors' living rooms. Wondering if our insurance company would consider that to be a non-covered Act of God...
By 8:00 am that morning, Clear Lake had come further out of its banks and was moving up our street and into our driveway, so we moved our cars to a nearby parking garage and waded home. And then began moving stuff upstairs. Not our first rodeo.
If the rain had kept falling on Sunday morning like it had overnight, we would have had water in our home, and who knows what might have happened to the boat. It didn't, though, and we escaped harm this time. We later learned that around 50 inches fell on the Clear Creek watershed during Harvey.
We finally gave up at 4:00 am, and got up to see what the water was doing behind our house (we live on a canal of Clear Lake). Even in the darkness, we could see that it had risen alarmingly since we'd gone to bed just a few hours earlier. Our sailboat seemed to be floating 10 feet away from the bulkhead, instead of right next to it, and it was tilting at a rakish angle. We could see that one of the corner lines was too tight and was pulling the boat down. We were going to have to do something quickly so the boat could right itself.
We threw on our rain gear and ran downstairs, but there was no way to get onto the boat...the water around it was too deep. We finally had the idea that we could get our extension ladder and string it from the bank to the boat, and then my husband could crawl across it to get onto the boat. This worked pretty well, although the boat (and therefore the ladder) was bobbing and swaying in the wind and pouring rain. It was pretty scary for me. When my husband got to the boat, he found that the too-tight line was so taut that there was no way he was going to get it untied, so he had to cut it loose. I was imagining the boat breaking completely free from its moorings in the rising water and blowing into one of our neighbors' living rooms. Wondering if our insurance company would consider that to be a non-covered Act of God...
By 8:00 am that morning, Clear Lake had come further out of its banks and was moving up our street and into our driveway, so we moved our cars to a nearby parking garage and waded home. And then began moving stuff upstairs. Not our first rodeo.
If the rain had kept falling on Sunday morning like it had overnight, we would have had water in our home, and who knows what might have happened to the boat. It didn't, though, and we escaped harm this time. We later learned that around 50 inches fell on the Clear Creek watershed during Harvey.
Type
photographs
Rights
This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license.
Source
This item was contributed via the Harvey Memories Project "Contribute an Item" form.
Date Created
2017-08-27
Date Submitted
2018-08-27
Date Available
2018-08-27
Spatial Coverage
+29.568876-095.062720/