Hey Steve,

Sounds like you've got a good plan, but I still wouldn't want to be in that neighborhood this weekend... Of course, this far out, it's still pretty tough to say - just a day or two ago, Irene was drawing a bead on Dan Y's TROPICAL DANCE in Brunswick, GA, they were predicting landfall at precisely that location, and now he's in the clear by a considerable margin...

They seem to keep moving the track further east, if this one just kisses Hatteras, anywhere east of Montauk better brace themselves...

This one definitely has my attention, I fully expect to be stripping my boat, at a minimum... I even had a close look at my charts of the Hudson River today, just for the hell of it... But I'm pretty protected where I am, I wouldn't seriously think about making a run for it up into the Catskills unless it was forecast as a Category 3 or higher...

One thing more than anything else makes me nervous about this storm - the NAME... "Irene" is definitely one of those old-fashioned hurricane names of the sort I remember from my youth, and not one of those ambiguously gay names the National Hurricane Center seems to favor these days... (grin)

Good luck, Steve...

best regards,

Jon