September 16, two days before Hurricane Isabel is expected to make landfall, the hovercraft can be seen ZOOMING up the Potomac River to find safe port in some harbor.

Maybe you can see the hovercraft better in this photo. They really do fly on the water and the sound they make and the mist they make are tremendous.

This is the last we’ll see of calm blue water for a few days.

It's Thursday morning, September 16, around 10:00 AM and the water has turned grey and very angry as you can (almost) see in this out-of-focus picture!

The jetty to the left of our house protected our cove for a while but when the waters rose maybe 4 feet above normal, with wave swells at 6-7 feet, it was of no help. The cove took quite a hit.

Looking from my yard South into Currioman Bay to the right you see the trees are being blown around (it's good that we took the flag down from the flag pole - which you can leaning in the center-right of the photo) you can see that neighbor Bob S. left his Parker on the boat lift. We can only hope that the dock is true and stays together! All our other neighbors, except for Buddy D. to the North of us, have taken their boats in.

Around 4:30 PM on Thursday, with the waters haven risen and with swells between 5 and 7 feet, what we expected began - the dock began to break up. AMAZING, when you see a dock, built from 2x6 boards that have been double bolted to the pilings, begin moving up and down as the water pleases. The water was pounding up through the boards just shaking the dock apart. Remember from grade school when you would twirl a pencil between your fingers so fast that it wobbled like rubber? That's what the dock looked like - a huge rubber eraser wobbling in the seas. This fuzzy photo and the next, taken through the window, show you the start of the-end-of-the-dock.

Out the window, out of focus, but still you can imagine ...

We then decided to take a short drive to the community marina to see how things were going. They were going ... up, down, splashing around, water over the docks and properties.

Two powerboat and two sailboat owners left their boats tied up. I don't know what happened - I haven't been back to the marina. I can only imagine that as the waters rose, so did the boats and that they ended up being on and then over the dock, and then broke their lines and (hopefully) ended up in the marshes.