Boat Storage in Florida or SE US?

[TacomaSailor]

We've been living aboard Mirador, our Caliber 40, in San Diego for almost 6-years. During the first three years it was part time and we maintained a home and residence in Washington State. In early 2014 we moved aboard full time and are now "California Residents" and are really paying the state a lot of money for that privilege.

This is our 2nd extended stay in California aboard our boat and we lived here, on land, for 3-years a long time ago. We are, once again, becoming very tired of dealing with California taxes and regulations and want to get of the state.

Our current thinking is to sail Mirador back to Puget Sound where we lived and sailed for many decades. We would live aboard Mirador in the Salish Sea from mid-June thru mid-October. We would also re-establish our legal residence and domicile in Washington which has no income tax. We can leave Mirador in an excellent, secure, and fairly new marina in Tacoma for about $300/month during the winter. We've used that marina several times in the past when we lived there.

We'd spend a month or so driving our RV to/from Florida where we want to keep a catamaran to live aboard during the November to April or May time frame. We want to be headed north by the time the daily air temp is above 88 or humidity is above 75%.

My family has lived in Cape Coral, Florida since the early 1980s and have kept a 20' - 26' boat on a canal much of the time. I know a great deal about hurricanes but nothing about storing a larger multi-hull in Florida during hurricane season.

Is a 40' catamaran safer / more secure in a well run dry storage facility or in a secure marina such as Burnt Store? The cost of summer storage for the catamaran is not significant compared to all the costs associated with keeping a 40' boat in the SE and another forty-footer in the NE corners of the continental US. So, I want to do what is safe and secure, not easy or cheap.

Do any of you folks have direct experience with your multi-hull in Florida dry storage in a TS or Hurricane?

We can leave the boat anywhere in the SE that is safe but we are leaving California to avoid income and property taxes so we do not want to keep the boat in a high tax state for five or six months a year.

Any suggestions about how we should manage a 40' catamaran in the US SE during hurricane season when we are 2,600 miles distant would be appreciated.

[tkeithlu]

Experience is going to be surprisingly hard to find, because it has (surprisingly) been more than 10 years since the last hurricane touched ANYWHERE on the Florida coast. We're on the panhandle, which I think is not your choice. Yes, we have a marina that can put your boat on blocks on land, but the challenge I think would be putting it above the surge zone anywhere in coastal Florida. A Category 3 would put the island our marina is on underwater. If Katrina had hit us, the water would have reached the circle road atTallahassee, 60 miles to our north......