Hey there!  My uncle used to work on fishing boats in Florida.  He'd take people out on trips into the Gulf of Mexico.
Cool! I used to leave near the Gulf of Mexico, in Galveston.
Were you there during Hurricane Ike in 2008?  It was a CAT 2 when it made landfall and caused a lot of flooding.
I was! It was scary, but fortunately I was not affected. There was a lot of flooding.
I'm glad you were OK!  That was a bad one, it affected the entire US economy for years afterward.  140,000 people had to evacuate.