Hurricane Helene

Dispatch from Tampa: Weary from Helene, Waiting on Milton 

A hurricane-savvy writer marks the moment when aftermath meets forecast
A group of people organize items that were impacted by flooding from Hurricane Helene.

Photo: Mike Carlson / Associated Press

Tampa residents clean up after Hurricane Helene.

Last fall, this all sounded like such a great idea.

My brother had been trying to sell his boat—a thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser, a working man’s yacht. He kept it on Grand Lake O’ the Cherokees in eastern Oklahoma. The lake is beautiful, but there’s not much to do besides float in circles.

“Don’t sell it,” I told him. “Let’s bring it to Tampa.” I pictured us anchored off Anclote Key, happy.

I’ve lived here since ’05, raised a family here in the vortex of sunshine and hucksterism. I’ve also covered just about every hurricane to threaten this peninsula for the Tampa Tribune and St. Petersburg Times

That kind of work has made me less afraid of hurricanes than most. They’re plodding, predictable—unlike the tornadoes I grew up with, which drop out of the sky and kill you, like the finger of God.

With hurricanes, you need a little patience. When Isaac threatened in 2012, my editor sent me south to Marco Island. I called when I arrived. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It turned.” Fourteen hours later, I was standing on a New Orleans levee in Isaac’s downpour. Another hurricane, I had friends who evacuated early, right into the path of the storm.

So some buddies and I built a lift on the Hillsborough River, which empties into Tampa Bay, and we brought the boat down. When my daughters went off to college, I started dreaming about living on the water.

A live-aboard boat is an equalizer, or a shortcut. Folks pay big money to live on the water here, and I could do it for the price of a Delta anchor. I’d loll on Tampa Bay, summon the ghosts of Hemingway and Melville, and write some fiction in paradise.

I rented my house out and moved aboard the Rinker in April—on the front end of the hottest summer in all of recorded human history. Then the hurricanes started.

This won’t surprise you, but no one pays closer attention to storms than people who live on boats. Well, except for the mamas of people who live on boats.

“Are you ready for Milton?!!!” mine texted yesterday. “Weather Channel says it’s stronger than Helene.”

For us, Helene was a water event. I moored at the city’s new floating dock and moved in with a friend. The wind picked up and water filled the bay and breached the seawalls and kept coming. The boat rode the rise, no problem. 

Others had it worse. At least twelve people died in nearby Pinellas County. Friends lost a lot to four feet of Helene’s surge. Since then, we’ve been cleaning up, helping neighbors empty their flooded homes. Coastal roads look like trash canyons, like every home vomited its waterlogged contents onto the public right-of-ways.

Before we could get it all to the dump, another was on its way to turn that debris into a hazard. Milton now.

“What happened to I, J, K and L?” a friend asked me. So goes this season. 

This one feels different. Maybe Helene shook folks from their apathy. Lines formed at the gas pumps. Bread disappeared from shelves.

We went back to work, securing furniture and boarding windows and gassing up chainsaws, fueled on Cubans and cafe con leche from the Latin market up the street, El Huracan. 

With my head down, I haven’t kept up with what they’re saying on the national news, but it must be bad. I count twenty-seven texts—make that twenty-eight—from out-of-state friends on Monday, asking if I’m okay, if I’m evacuating, if I’m still on the boat.

“This is heartbreaking,” my cousin Lisa in Ohio texted.

No, not yet. Patience. Mandatory evacuations for some zones are underway. We’ve had time to prepare. 

I’m headed across the river soon to tie up again. The wind is starting to pick up. Let’s hope the lines hold.


More coverage of Hurricane Helene and its aftermath, including ways you can help those affected by the storm


Ben Montgomery is a writer and substitute teacher living in Tampa.


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