Days after Tropical Storm Bertha came through Baldwin County, Pirates Cove in Josephine was unfazed, holding the 20th year of their annual High Hopes for Autism FUNraiser this past weekend.

Featuring live music, an art market right by the beach and an elaborate raffle for a Jeep, the event benefits High Hopes 4 Autism, a nonprofit that specializes in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) based therapy for school-aged children, focusing on language development and social behavior.

Rachael Mueller, co-founder of the event and director of High Hopes Clinic, was inspired to open a clinic due to the lack of services in the area at the time, with her daughter having been diagnosed with the autism spectrum. She said the annual event raises roughly $100,000 every year.

“It just blows me away that our community just continues to support us year after year,” Mueller said. “I’m so grateful to have the support of our community because it’s the same people buying these tickets every year, and without this event, we would not be able to have the kind of clinic that we have.”

The annual fundraiser is run by a core group of volunteers, some of whom have been participating since year one.

“Everyone you see with a yellow shirt on for the most part is either a volunteer or a family member of ours,” said Paul Mueller, who co-owns Pirates Cove with his brother Karl. “Some of the people have done it all 20 years, and then some of the people just found out or just moved to the area and they start doing some community involvement. I’m fire chief here, so community involvement is important to me.”

Situated just a short boat ride away from Perdido Bay, patrons arrived both on land and by water for the event. Just days earlier, Tropical Storm Bertha swept through Baldwin County, bringing in high tides and rip currents.

Although some coastal areas were hit harder than others, for Mueller, Bertha ranked at the bottom of the list of storms, calling it more of an inconvenience for Pirates Cove, which has been owned by the Mueller family since the 1950s.

“It wasn’t bad,” Mueller said. “If I could have one of those once or twice a year and we never saw a major storm, that would be fantastic. It would be far cheaper to lose a little bit of revenue compared to physical damage.”

Unlike other storms in the past, Bertha didn’t force them to stay closed. Mueller said the criteria for closing usually depends on if the parking lot is submerged. Despite high tide bringing water almost to the main building, Pirates Cove remained open, with the establishment providing updates on the weather on their social media pages as water lapped over the beach picnic tables.

Reflecting on the many storms Pirates Cover has weathered through the years, Mueller said Hurricane Sally was the worst for the business, saying 95% of the outside deck was destroyed. He also cited Hurricane Ivan, Hurricane George and Hurricane Frederick, the latter of which he was 10 years old for. Each hurricane brought debris and roof damage.

“Storms will show you things that you didn’t really want to know with a 100-year-old building,” Mueller said. “We fixed some things that are long-term fixes in the process of just getting back open, so it exposed some stuff we didn’t know, some problems we didn’t know we had, but we had addressed them as we went.”

For Mueller, keeping everything functioning, in a way, is a rewarding challenge that comes with running the family business, whether it be traversing through the storms or something that breaks in another way. Just that day, the soda fountain started shooting soda six feet across the room after an employee fiddled with it.

“Stuff breaks all the time,” Mueller said. “We do a lot of our own repairs here. I have some engineering training and management information systems also. Two different degrees, but you wouldn’t think management information systems and engineering go together for doing stuff around here, but they actually do.”

It's all just another day in making cheeseburgers in paradise.