Somewhere Over the Rainbow

So the massive cold front finally moved through Pontiac... and WOW! It dropped from 72 degrees to 32 degrees in less than two hours. We seriously had near hurricane-force winds -- fortunately it was blowing out of the north and not the southwest... Bobby Gunkel circled the park and stopped to chat with Tim for a minute, when he looked up to see his own boat sailing across the cove. "Well, there goes my boat!" Sure enough, it had broken loose from the 800 dock and was floating into the far side of the cove. "What do you want to do?" Tim said. "Let's go get it!" Bob said. So the two jumped in the work boat and headed over there. They couldn't do anything with the wind blowing that hard, so they had to leave it. In the meantime, two more boats broke loose from the same dock and floated into the same cove -- all three are still there, as the wind hasn't laid down enough for the guys to rescue them yet (you can see them in the picture above, waaaay back there).

While they were heading out in the work boat, I drove over to the parking lot by the launch ramp to take some pictures of the swells (six-footers at least) crashing onto the shore. When I got over there the wind ripped my car door out of my hand so fast, it nearly took the door off. And that's no exaggeration. It bent it so far back I could barely close it. It's totally messed up. Not to mention when I got out of the car I could hardly stand up. (Tim says it's the strongest straight-line winds he has ever seen. It's certainly the strongest I've ever seen.) Milt Hoefle drove up and we started to chat when the roof started peeling off the dock right in front of us (see pic above). Fortunately, that's really the only damage to the docks so far, besides a few lockers blown over. We haven't had a chance to check over every square inch, but we will. A few folks have been down to check on their boats. If you're in the area it might not be a bad idea to check on yours... but wait until the wind calms down. Hopefully we've seen the worst of it, but I don't know. The dock's still rockin' pretty good. We'll keep you posted.

Oh, of course... now the sun is shining!