On Thursday, August 16, Hurricane Dean had just slammed into Martinique and St. Lucia and was headed for the Caribbean Sea. It was predicted to follow a path well to the south of us, but it was growing in intensity, so we decided to play it safe and head for the hurricane hole about 5 miles away from Salinas in Bahia de Jobos. A satellite image of Dean as it passed south of Puerto Rico is pictured here, on Saturday, August 18. Puerto Rico is completely covered by the northern edge of Dean, which stretched for over 400 miles from its northern edge to the Venezuelan coast on its southern edge. We never saw winds over 40 knots, but it rained in sheets all day Saturday off and on. It was a good "dress rehearsal" for what to do.
Here is the boat as we are prepping it. The mainsail got lashed to the boom, and the boom was lashed to its crutch. We also double tied the jib in case the furling line came loose, and stowed the small staysail jib below decks.

Had more wind been predicted, we would have taken down all sails and put them below decks, as well as all canvas. We also would have taken off the wind generator (we did tie it down so it wouldn't rotate during the storm). We also took the motor off the dinghy and put the dinghy on deck and lashed it down. Had more wind been predicted we would have folded the dinghy up and brought it below (where would we have slept, I wonder, with all these things below?).
I think, in hindsight, the biggest safety measure we could have taken but didn't would have been to take down the jib; we heard many stories of loose jibs in storms. My secondary tie would probably not have held, and it was below the jib sheets.
We also put down two anchors, our primary Bruce 33 lb. with 5/16 inch all-chain and a 15 foot, 3/4 inch chafe-guarded snubbing line, and our secondary CQR 25 lb. on 30 feet of 5/16 inch chain and 1/2 inch nylon rode. We also took one line ashore and tied it to a sturdy mangrove, with garden hose chafe guarding the mangrove side and more chafe guard in the anchor chock. For a worse storm we would have used more lines ashore and picked a narrower section of mangrove creek.
Here are our neighbors in the mangrove section we secured ourselves in. Everyone was very friendly and we all helped each other out.