Well, TS Maria was certainly a challenge for those weather folks and quite frustrating for those of us in her projected path.
At various times they had her going below us, just to the west, over to the east by St Martin, even more so to the east missing all of the islands... and, of course, right on top of us passing over St Croix. Prediction of windspeeds up to 70MPH with it becoming a hurricane on the other side of Puerto Rico and, my favorite, the forecast where she was to fizzle out and possibly be downgraded to a lowly tropical WAVE... not even a TD :)
This didn't happen. She stayed a tropical storm but we were pretty much unaffected. We've had a few non-TS days like this over the summer where you have some swell and a bit of wind. My type of storm... a non-event! We appreciate it, Maria.
From Wunderground.com
Sunday, 11 September 2011, 09:14am AST
We made our storm preparations and don't mind that it was "for nothing". Not so... We got provisions, water, fuel, charged up the 48V battery bank, straightened up the boat, threw things away, etc... Not a bad thing at all.
The bad part about preparing for a storm is seeing that your neighboring boats are once again doing nothing. One guy, who we'll call "Homer" called us at 5pm the evening before the storm is to hit to say he'll be out at about 6pm to sort out his mooring and can we give him a ride to his boat. Leaving it a bit late, aren't you? He said he didn't come out the day before because he didn't feel like it. We told him that we were busy laying out another anchor for OUR boat but we'd help him tomorrow after we finished our preparations. He laughed and implied that that was too late (is that MY fault or PROBLEM???). I just said we're busy, bye, and hung up.
I could rant on about this but I will refrain. Bob has a bit about it in yesterday's
Boat Bits. I will add that the second anchor that was deployed for his boat (Homer stood on deck while Bob did the work) was a lightweight Bruce that Homer only paid out a total of about 35 feet of chain (15 foot depth + 4 feet to bow roller = how much chain on the bottom?). Chain does no good on the boat, as we thought everyone knows, but...
Fortunately the storm gave us a pass. Bob has definitely earned some good Karma points helping this guy, even though his real motive was that it was helping us.
No more ranting...
Bob has made some lovely Sunday morning blueberry waffles. It is a nice day. Life is good :)
So It Goes !
