Julia Escardo had to sit down. For the past several hours, she had been working frantically to get the Aeolus ready.
She taped reinforced plastic sheets on the windows of the pilot house, dropped an anchor off the bow, lashed extra lines to the pilings and tried to stow or tie down every moveable piece of gear above deck.
"Aeolus is the keeper of the winds in Greek mythology," Escardo said with a half smile. "I really hope he puts his winds back in his bag."
Escardo and her husband, Hector, have lived aboard the 60-foot, two-masted ketch docked at the St. Petersburg Municipal Marina for four years. On Thursday, they were part of a small army of boat owners who descended on the docks to do what they could to save their boats from Charley.
"I'm absolutely horrified," she said. "If we get the 15-foot storm surge they say we'll get, this whole marina will be a disaster."
Escardo said she and her husband, both 62, planned to leave the boat this morning and stay with their son elsewhere in St. Petersburg.
She noted that the Aeolus had been insured, but that she and her husband had let the policy lapse.
"Oops," she said.
All around the region Thursday, boat owners were lashing their crafts down with double lines, evacuating and hoping their boats were still there intact when they come back Saturday. The biggest fear is that storm surge and high winds will send expensive boats aimlessly adrift.
At Ross Marine in Clearwater's Island Estates Thursday, the phone rang again and again. Yard coordinator Pat Brami politely interrupted one worried customer.
"I know what you're going to ask me," Brami said. "And the answer is, "Sorry, no.' "
There was no more time or space at the marina to pull the boat out of the water and place it on jacks. "We've done this (storm preparation) drill many times before," said Brami, a 21-year employee at Ross. "But it's never been this intense. It's scary."
Outside, Michael Galasso, 43, pulled his boat, Yachts of Loans (he's a mortgage lender) into an empty slip. The protected cove is a better bet than the slip behind his Clearwater Beach home, he said, tying on an extra line.
But all his extra lines will mean nothing, he said, if the hurricane hits dead on.
"If there is a 10-foot surge, this thing is going to be flapping around the parking lot," he said. "Good thing for insurance."
In Tarpon Springs, dozens of commercial fishing vessels jammed the narrows of the Anclote River along the Sponge Docks. Sailors busily lashed their boats together all along Dodecanese Boulevard.
And at Clearwater's Municipal Marina, Ken Gibson double-taped his control panel shut, a last-ditch effort to keep the saltwater from damaging his 40-foot Vista trawler.
For more than four hours Thursday, Gibson tightened some rope lines and loosened others.
"I'll be sitting at home, Friday, thinking about her," said Gibson, who lives on high ground in Clearwater. "I'll be wondering what else I could've done."
Staff writers Candace Rondeaux and Aaron Sharockman contributed to this report.
National Hurricane Center
