"Minx" (formerly "Target", nee "Minx" pictures

[Jon Brooks]

I culled these stills from some home-movies I rescued from Mom & Dad's Hurricane-ravaged home on Long Island.  The movie was shot around 1964 (the year I was born!).  Yes, this is #1376 currently residing on the floor of the Herreshoff Marine Museum.















And the next year, Dad bought the "tender" for his yacht for $3,000:



Jon 

[HerreshoffHistory]

Wonderful!

Thanks for posting!

[Adam]

How bad was the house?

[launchmaker]

Great pic! Glad you took the time to get those images off the 8 or 16 mm film. Sorry about your parents home. My house in NJ got 26" in our first floor. It's not fun... 

[Jon Brooks]

They had 8' of water in the basement, plus another 28-30" on the first floor.  The Living Room, Dining Room, Kitchen, Guest Bedroom/bath and enclosed porch were all destroyed, along with the furniture and appliances.

They just got heat restored last week, and hope to have all of the re-wiring done soon.  The walls below the waterline had to be gutted.  The boathouse was a complete disaster, with all of the tools, and gear soaking in salt water.  I spent a week there just trying to salvage what I could.

The Wild Duck survived with only minor damage to the forward hinge-windows in the deck-house, and the cabin hatch.  Relatively easy fixes.

Jon 

[Charles Barclay]

I did a presentation three weeks ago for Hawaii State Civil Defense (we are updating our hurricane and tsunami plans), the stat I pulled from Boat US is 65,000 vessels damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. 

My Dad's cat boat was found on land, wedged between a couple of trees a half mile from the yard where it had been hauled for the winter two days before.  My nephew's Opti floated from Bay Head YC to someone's yard across Barnegat Bay.  The new inlet cut at Mantoloking by the storm has been filled. 

In comparison, the "Long Island Express" hurricane of 1938 which was bigger, and badder, cost 680 lives plus 700 injuries, $400 million in property damage, destroyed 4500  homes and farms, damaged 15139 others: 2605 vessels lost,  3369 damaged; 26,000 automobiles smashed, and 275,000,000 trees broken off or uprooted. From Everett Allen's 1976 A Wind to Shake the World.  Density is the difference.  But for us many lost boats that no longer show on the registry were destroyed in 1938. 

Jon, glad the family is ok, and hope they are getting back to normality.

[launchmaker]

Charles,

I had the unfortunate experience of standing on the front walls of Bay Head homes torn off and strewn across the bay to Beaton's boatyard in Mantoloking  last month. The amount of wood boats there with holes punched in them and others just carried off into the marshes is truly amazing.  I talked to an underwater welder working as a salvager who said he had pulled 103 boats out of the bay in the last month. I'm glad I didn't take any of my boats for a ride after the storm. There are so many refrigerators, washers and dryers, lumber etc. out there plus all the sand pumped in when the inlet opened at Mantoloking.

I hope your Dad's boat is ok. Most just floated and settled nicely far from their blocking. If you need some help with it, I have a boat repair shop. Wood boats are my thing, but I take plastic catboat jobs because the hull lines are classic.

And Jon,

I feel bad for your folks' losses, they took a bad shot.

 Do you have any pics of the Wild Duck we could see? Pics of boats are way more interesting than the shots of broken homes I see every day around here. Good luck with the restoration

[Steve]

The devastation on the Jersey shore was terrible.  The S-Boat VOLUNTEER was in the yard at Beaton's, as was the WH15 QUEST.  I wonder how they fared?

[launchmaker]

I think I saw Quest laid up next to the A cat Bat. Many of the sailboats were nestled together as they were swept toward Beaton's access road and were caught and stopped by the tree line there. I guess a lot of powerboats were really able to make some distance since they didn't have keels dragging across the marina, marshes, etc to slow their voyage. Don't recall seeing Volunteer, I'll look through some of the pics I took

[Adam]

The Wild Duck is a 1928 Matthews that is kept in bristol condition by the Brooks family. Lots of fond memories on her as a kid - she is a true icon on great south bay....very glad she survived - I had no idea the house took that much of a hit - wish I had known I would have shot down and helped.... How bad was the boathouse - doors stay put? I'm glad Downeast resides in VT now.

[Jon Brooks]

If our 12 was still there, she would have floated off her cradle and ended up somewhere weird inside the boathouse. 

We tied the 13' Whaler to the workbench as a joke a few days before the storm.  It would have floated off too.

Owen and I moved the Wild Duck outside when I was down for my uncle's funeral a few day before, and anchored it with the two Herreshoff anchors off the bow, another off the stern, and a huge Danforth off the stern, plus about six to 8 dock-lines.  Believe it or not, most of the dock lines failed as the cleats pulled out.  But she was anchored so well that she didn't move.

Structurally, the south wall of the boathouse building appears to have sunk a little.  The doors all still work, except that debris floating in the water smashed against the sliding door on the south wall, and that will need to be rebuilt.  It's been there since 1912 or so, so maybe its time.  The doors to and from the porch and kitchen are all stuck. 

With all the scraps of blocking and such, there was a ton of stuff to be picked up and cleaned off.  The electrical service which was about shoulder high was completely submerged if you can imagine that!

Jon 

[Adam]

Gesh way worse then i expected. '38 couldn't have been a picnic either in those parts - wonder what the house was like then? Did you check out 'Tuck? How did they fair? I assume the clubhouse was hammered - but the Bluejays....not the Bluejays :-)

Did the Horror House survive? (I had to ask!) :-)

[Jon Brooks]

The "Horror House" and all of the older homes on Ocean Avenue survived well as they sit on higher land.  The end of Ocean Avenue looked like Japan after the Tsunami. 

The cabins down at the end of the creek got splintered and driven through the homes on Unqua Place.  The Red Cross established a soup kitchen there!  The back walls of a few homes down by the Yacht Club fell into the bay, and one elderly couple escaped on a surf board at the height of the storm.

Unqua Corinthian's club house has several feet of water in the dining room.  Narrasketuck was just messy for the most part.  They've posted pics on their Facebook page:  http://www.facebook.com/NarrasketuckYC?rf=152428284773013

I spoke with the Dumpers who had an old Richardson Cruiser tied up to their dock, and the tide went up so high that the dock lines flipped the boat upside down and the escaping air blew a hole in the bottom of the hull.

Jon