Hear the wind blow, love, hear the wind blow

So having given serious consideration to returning to the eastern side of the Atlantic, we have decided to stay in the Americas one more year, and press south, to exit the hurricane zone before the hurricane season. Now I should explain here the concepts of “hurricane zone” and “hurricane season”. Even if your name is not Michael Fish, you probably know that hurricanes, or at least hurricane strength storms, can occur anywhere and at any time of year. Indeed even Eliza Dolittle was at least partly aware of this. The hurricane zone is generally considered to be most of the Caribbean, except the very south bit of it (where we're going), and up to the Southern United States, I don't know exactly where the northern boundary actually lies. The “hurricane season” is officially 1^st June through to the 30^th November, and what that means is you are more likely to have a hurricane in that area at that time of year.

Grenada, just south of the Grenadines, used to be considered out of the zone until 2004 when it was pretty well devastated by hurricane Ivan, and then hit again the following year by the less destructive Emily. However the fact is, global warming or not, Grenada gets hit by a hurricane on average every fifty years, further South in Trinidad, the batting average is more like once every hundred years. Either way, I don't think much of them odds boss, at least not at first sight, but then, as no doubt the aforementioned Met man can tell you, didn't we have a visit in Ireland from one H. Charlie about 20 odd years ago. And then, I remember a book when I was at school called “the Big Wind” which described what must have been about as nasty as a pretty nasty hurricane, and then how often do we hear of hurricane force winds battering the coast (thankfully for us dubs that's usually the coast of Donegal, sorry Daniel!). So even if you stay under the bed you can still get a rude meteorological awakening.

So then, let's accept that we are slightly more at risk of being hit by a hurricane here than at home in the bosom of the cosy shire, there's the question of what we're going to do in the event.

Well we have a choice (usually) of whether to dig in or run. There is a very very very slight possibility of a hurricane forming on our doorstep too rapidly for the Met people to give enough warning for us to have time to run, in which case digging in is your only man. With all the met info, computer models, and satellite data that they have these days though, they can watch the hurricanes forming and predict where it's going to go with a good deal of accuracy. Unfortunately though, predicting the route of a hurricane is a bit like predicting the course of a spinning top. A butterfly flaps its wings and the whole thing goes off in another direction.

This unpredictability is the main problem with running, because there's always the chance that your engine will fail and the wind will die and then the big destructive spinning top will come after you, and catch you up at sea, and that would be that for a little boat like ours!

So dig in. Still we have choices. One I haven't made yet is whether to stay on board to protect the boat, or go to a hotel or land based shelter and leave the boat to fend for itself having secured it as best we can. Given that I'm essentially a wuss, and that there's danger to life and limb, I am inclined to opt for the run for the hills option, and patch up any damage to the boat later, but then, since the chances of the 'urricane hactually 'appening or so slim, I'm just going to cross that bridge if and when I have to.

Picture shows a Church in Granada's capital St George, missing some essential weatherproofing after Ivan's vis.it in 2004