TYBEE ISLAND - The day after a mandatory evacuation went into effect here, most stores and restaurants were closed and boarded up. Plywood covered many homes' windows, benches and picnic tables had been proactively upended as a stiff wind whipped trees back and forth. Water in the marshes along the causeway from Savannah lapped at the road.
A perfect time to go surfing, Noah Mosely and Will Waters figured.
"It's pretty windy," Mosely said. "Really fun waves. The biggest I've surfed this season - the best."
He was coming in about 11:30 a.m. but said he'd be back: "To hell with the storm," he scoffed.
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On Thursday evening, with Hurricane Irma still expected to strike Georgia’s east coast, residents of this low-lying island -some of whom had just barely recovered from Hurricane Matthew - hustled to stuff sandbags and board up.
“Absolutely, no question about it, we’re preparing more this time,” Brian Hussey said as he hefted shovels full of sand from the volleyball court behind City Hall. Matthew turned his family’s island home into a swamp, prompting his fevered preparation ahead of Irma.
By Saturday the island’s holdouts didn’t seem too alarmed. Certainly not the guys kite surfing on the beach.
“My name’s Mack - like the truck,” a guy named Mack Kitchens (like the room where you cook) said by way of explaining his outing amid an evacuation order.
He lives two blocks from the ocean but was mostly interested in the wind’s entertainment value.
“It’ll probably be good this afternoon,” he said.
Early forecasts showed Irma taking a hard right turn toward the east, hitting Georgia's coast as a Category 3 storm. Matthew, the monster that pounded Tybee and left widespread flooding and destruction in its wake, was a Category 2 that weakened to a Category 1 as it made landfall.
With Irma headed farther west than initially projected, Rebecca and Matt Williams are staying put on Tybee. Sadly, though, their home is actually in Naples, Fla. They'd come up for a vacation before Irma's immense threats to Florida had become clear, and so didn't take precautions to prepare their house.
"It looked like it was to stay east," Matt Williams sighed as he and Rebecca got coffee at a convenience store on 1st Street, the main drag into town.
The store’s manager, who didn’t want to be named, was on the phone with worried employees, wondering if they’d be able to make it.
“If you come right now, you’ll be fine,” she said, an eye on the tidal charts.
Anyone who stays put is going to need to prepare to be here a while, as the causeway will surely flood. The Williamses are fine with that, given the alternatives.
“I refuse to go to Atlanta,” Rebecca Williams said, cringing at the metro area’s horrendous traffic in any circumstance, much less a hurricane. “I don’t like Atlanta on a good day.”
