Barb Hansen stood at her sliding door, looking out to her backyard in Cape Coral and her 36-foot Grand Banks trawler tied up at the dock. It was about 4 p.m. on September 28, 2022. Hurricane Ian pounded harder and harder until her trawler was lunging up and down in 12-foot swings, with storm surge roiling the Gulf of Mexico and rivers heading inland to southwest Florida.
“Water started coming into our house so fast,” she recalls. “It was four adults, four cats and three dogs in the attic for eight hours. We sat around the opening of the attic in our garage and watched the water come in. We’re about 8 feet above sea level, where we were located, and about 4 feet of water came in.”
It would be another month before she could even get to the site of the business she had built up, also in Cape Coral, since 1984. Southwest Florida Yachts had a fleet of a dozen boats it used for bareboat courses and charters. The storm surge that fleet endured was even worse than the one that wrecked her house.
“We had about a 15-foot storm surge at the marina,” she says. “All the boats came up 15 feet and off the pilings and on top of each other. It was a huge mess, just a huge mix of boats and docks and debris everywhere. It was unrecognizable.”
Since then, Hansen has spent pretty much every moment of every day battling with insurance companies and providers of all kinds of services, not only to get her own life sorted out, but also to get Southwest Yacht Charters up and running again. In October, she announced that the company was reopening with two boats—a Fairline 46 and a Silverton 43—taking bookings that will start on March 1, when the marina is finally expected to have power restored.
“At 68, I’m starting over like when I was 28,” she says. “You just have to keep going. I have employees and customers depending on me.”
It hasn’t been easy. Different boats have different insurers. The business had a different insurer. Her home and personal vehicles had other insurers. All of them have required her to slog through computer-generated “Press One to Raise Your Stress Level” messages in order to get claims processed.
“It’s decades of paying these premiums, and then when you need it, they’re saying, ‘That’s not covered, sorry, that’s not covered either,’” she says. “I still have two boat owners who are waiting. The insurance companies denied their claims on the littlest things, so we’re still going through that with some boats in our fleet.”
Immediately after the reopening announcement went out in October, customers began calling to book bareboat charters and classes, she says. Some are people whose previous bookings had to be canceled after the storm, who have been waiting all this time to reschedule. “Finally, they are now booked for January and February for their class and their charter, and they’re so excited,” Hansen says. “They said I must be excited too. Well, you can’t even imagine.”
Customers who book the bareboats at Southwest Florida Charters will not see any of the devastation that was all over the media in Hurricane Ian’s immediate aftermath, she says. Most of the region’s marinas have reopened for boaters, with or without other services like restaurants that may still be coming back online, and much of the region’s scenery is back to being beautiful.
“There’s no debris in the water or anything like that,” Hansen says. “A month after the storm, yeah, they were still picking out boats that sank, but all of that is cleaned up. It looks really nice now. There are areas that you wouldn’t even know were touched.”
Hansen’s plan is to build the Southwest Florida Yachts fleet back up to about eight boats—she’s accepting inquiries from interested boat owners now—and to continue running the business from its original office, which suffered minimal damage in the storm. The company’s boutique also was undamaged and has remained open, selling coastal-themed items to tourists and locals.
“I have a different appreciation now for all of these pictures you see on TV after a hurricane goes through. I see those people, and I know how that feels, to lose everything in the course of a few hours,” Hansen says. “You don’t often have an opportunity to start over. Not that I wanted to, but we lost personal boats, from 13-foot Whalers to our 36-foot trawler. That really simplifies your life. It’s not how I wanted to do it, but it does simplify things, and you realize what you don’t need. I’m still able to do most things that I did before, just with a lot less stuff.”
This article was originally published in the January 2024 issue.
