Ahh, good to read the link again that Wizzstick mentioned ( Letters to and From the Watchtower Society Concerning Noah's Flood). LOVE IT!
Those letters may have been the very first seeds of doubt to me. I wasn't even seriously thinking about the possibility of TTATT at that moment, but for years I DID secretly believe that the flood could have been local instead of global, since early humanity probably inhabited just parts of Europe, Asia and Africa centered around the middle-east. Apart from all the biological/psychical objections it was the strong logic from that 2nd letter to the Watchtower regarding the Hebrew word for 'earth' that touched me most and fuelled my personal intuition that the WT teaching was too dogmatic in this matter. A gem and personal favourite from that 2nd letter:
The book of Genesis states that the flood was earth wide. The Hebrew word for ‘earth’ is ‘erets’. Other occurrences of erets include:
Exodus 9:33: this verse states that the “rain did not pour down on the earth”. Here, the word earth must be understood to mean only in the area of Egypt.
2 Chronicles 36:23: here, Cyrus’ empire is said to include “all the kingdoms of the earth”. But surely this scripture is not meant to include empires in the Far East, Africa or in the Americas. At other times, the word erets is not even translated as earth, making it even more obvious that the word does not necessarily imply the entire physical globe. Examples of this include:
Genesis 12:1. That reads: "Go your way out of your country...to the country that I shall show you".
Genesis 19:31: here Lot’s daughter’s state that there is “not a man in the land (earth, King James version) to have relations with us”. Obviously, they are not referring to the entire physical globe, only the general area in which they live.
And Genesis 20:1 states "Abraham journeyed from there to the land of the Negeb”.
Thus, it appears as though the word erets can be translated as earth, land or country.