Well Hurricane Irma has come and gone and things are almost back to 100% at Bud n' Mary's thankfully. It was a devestating storm that the Keys will remember for a long time to come. We'd been very fortunate in Islamorada and the rest of the Florida Keys, being spared a major hurricane disaster since Hurricane Donna in the 1960s. While we've had brushes with several storms, nothing has compared to this. Not even Hurricane Andrew did nearly the amount of damage Irma did to us. The Lower Keys, Big Pine Key and souther Marathon, definitely took the brunt of it. Much of Islamorada and Key Largo did much better, especially properties that are on the bayside or near the road. But everyone on the ocean got the full punch and suffered much more of the storm surge and brutal wind power directly. We had a total of about 8 feet of extra water come up over Bud n' Mary's property. All of the buildings had some flooding in them. Luckily all of the boats did very well tied up in the mangroves, or taken on dry land. We didn't lose any boats and only had some minor damage on some of our houseboats due to tree branches and moving them around. The docks at the marina were probably the toughest thing to deal with. We lost our entire large dock where most of our houseboats are tied too, and that took several months to get rebuilt. One of the problems after a big hurricane is just getting materials and man power, as there is catastophic damage everywhere. Power and water was lost on site too which took several days to get restored. We had trash from about a mile up the beach from our property all wash down to ours, as our barn sticks out past the end of the mainland here and made a big collection point for everything. We had 2 bobcats working for 10 hours a day for 3 straight days just moving debris out to be picked up. They were really life savers! We were very fortunate and able to reopen the marina with limited capacity on October 1, just 3 weeks after the storm hit. We had limited rooms available, and even some charter captains back to fishing at that point. Winds gusted up to 130 mph or so though were steady around 100 mph. We were fortunate our giant storage barn made it through, only losing the bottom part of the metal around the outside of it and a small part of the roof ripped up. We lost just about every AC unit on the property. All the water lines and power around the docks was destroyed and had to be rebuilt. We had a good amount of drywall to rip out and replace in several building. The roof on our penthouse suite was ripped up and had to be patched and ultimately redone to fix it right. Everywhere that water could find a way in, it did. Luckily now 3 months later, we are back up and running with all of our hotels and charter boats. All our offices and stores are operational again and we have live bait, frozen bait, and a selection of fishing tackle and clothing. We are still not 100% done with the docks where our houseboats go, however that will hopefully be done before christmas week. Here are a bunch of pictures from the storm. Hurricane Irma will forever be remembered here in the Florida Keys.
