On Saturday, September 15th 2018, the night before Super Typhoon Mangkhut hit Hong Kong, a few of us from Hebe Haven Yacht Club gathered in the bar for an after-work drink — exhausted from days spent preparing our boats. Mangkhut had grown from a tropical depression near the Marshall Islands into a storm 550 miles across, with an eye nearly 70km wide — the biggest, strongest storm anywhere on the planet that year. We'd watched it on Windy.com for ten days hoping it would swing north to Taiwan or south to Hainan, like the previous 22 storms that season. It didn't.
By 3am the first big gusts hit. By 6am, all hell was breaking loose. The Observatory raised the T10 signal — only the third such signal since 1999, with gusts of 110–120 knots recorded in Victoria Harbour. Boats were dragging, dancing, and in some cases simply disappearing. Roughly 30% of the boats in the mooring field were gone — sunk, capsized, or simply vanished.
Through the worst of it — sustained 80, gusting over 100 knots for hours — a small crew of us kept going back out: fending boats off with marker buoys, winching a damaged pontoon back from a hull it was sawing into, freeing a powerboat that had drifted onto a friend's catamaran.
I woke up the next morning realising how lucky I'd been — and how stupid, playing hero for half a day in a storm that size. Next typhoon, Malarky goes to a proper shelter, every inch of canvas comes off, and I ride it out from the office.
Lessons learned
- Never leave your headsail up in a storm — 28 boats with blown-out headsails, 6 lost their mast.
- All pontoon cleats need replacing with much stronger ones.
- Moorings need much heavier blocks, chain and shackles.
- Never buy a boat with pop-up cleats.
- Heavier mooring lines, minimum 3-inch gauge.