Riding Out The Storm, Literally

Sunday afternoon, while everyone else was cleaning up and pumping out, friends Patrick Gauthier and Dave Royer found a new way to ride out Groton's storm induced power outage.

Royer, an EB employee who had been evacuated from Norfolk, Virginia just two days earlier, came over from East Lyme to spend the day with his buddy Gauthier who is a Groton resident and fellow EB employee. 

With most businesses closed for the day, and the power out for an indefinite period as crews works to clear downed trees and restore power lines, the two friends were at a loss what to do.   They wandered down to the Kenneth E. Streeter State Boat Launch under the Goldstar Bridge, where they discovered the floating dock was bucking like crazy. 

After returning with a couple of chairs the two men spent the next couple of hours

 in high winds and water too rough even for the fish, 'riding' the dock.  Said Gauthier,  "It beats sitting at home in the dark".  He was on call for EB, but if 'the phone wasn't ringing, he wasn't going'. 

Both men agreed it "got pretty wild for awhile," said Royer, "There were a lot of waves coming in a row like groups of five of them ... [and] we had the wind blowing us straight back." The winds were so strong that they periodically had to move their chairs forward again to keep from toppling backwards off the dock. 

People would stop down, curious what they were doing, as they sat on the bucking  platform.  And they both laughed as they described the woman who stopped to ask what they were smoking.