This past weekend, my brother and I went down to Crystal Beach on the Bolivar Peninsula to do some cleanup work on our familie's beach house.

We were lucky, from the satellite photos, our house unlike 70% of the other houses was left standing. The deck was gone, about half the siding on the house was gone, everything downstairs was gone, but the inside upstairs was fine (except for the refrigerator containing frozen shrimp that had gone a month without power).

The devastation was mind numbing.

A complete town called Gilchrest, where I have spent over 100 hours fishing, had exactly one house left standing. Another town called Caplan vanished (Gilchrest had a lot more to lose though).

Maybe building on the barrier islands is foolish. This all happened from a Category 1 Hurricane with an abnormally high storm surge. Our beach house was standing in at least 9 feet of water at the peak.

I have a ton of pictures, I will see about getting them hosted.