Well for us Dorian has been and gone, its been quite an experience, to say the least!
For many years at this time of year we’ve watched from afar this part of the USA coastline, the Caribbean, the Bahamas and all the islands in between be threatened by these sometimes monstrous wind storms, sometimes thinking why don’t these people just leave? Well having been here, now we know why they don’t.
As with ordinary weather forecasting, there’s a horrendous amount of guesswork, ok maybe that’s unfair, not guesswork but assumptions, (although we’re getting a lot better and over the last 5 years technology has made us better informed) there are still no perfect ways of predicting weather accurately, as the variables and the components that affect those variables are also variable, there are just too many factors to be able to accurately predict what’s going to happen on a certain day let alone at a certain time in that day.
Hurricane predictions and reporting fall into the same category, as clearly demonstrated by Dorian. The forecasters gather as much information from sea buoys, land-based monitoring equipment, from the air force, from people visually watching on its route and a lot of past history and try and predict which way and how big these things are going to be.
Even the President of the United States makes his own predictions with a sharpie! Obviously wrong, but hey that goes without saying.
So this time we got away with it, nothing more than a breezy day down at a UK beach, in the end, the tidal surge didn’t really affect us either, hopefully, there won’t be a “next time”!
THE BAHAMAS
However, that wasn’t the case for the poor souls in the Bahamas, these communities rely on tourism and visits from yachties like us for a living, they are often small shops or cafe/restaurants business, or diving/boat trips etc, these lovely people took the full force of a CAT 5,
It wiped out their homes, shops and business and now their infrastructure is on its knees. The International Red Cross also said as many as 13,000 houses could have been destroyed. “There might no longer be any clean water readily available because of storm surges flooding wells,”
Assuming we can safely moor off, we are going to volunteer down there as soon as we can. they need all the help they can get, both physically and financially.
PLEASE GIVE TO A REPUTABLE CHARITY!
Giving money to help aid relief is also a delicate area, unfortunately, many scam charities jump on the back of disasters like these and in these cases, sadly sometimes very little and in some extreme cases no funding gets thru at all. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give, it just means you should just be more careful, the link below is off an Organisation that checks out charities and gives them a rating based on their performance, that way you can choose who you want to give to based on the facts.
IF YOU CAN, PLEASE GIVE GENEROUSLY A TENNER WELL HELP OUT TREMENDOUSLY, BUT THE MORE YOU CAN GIVE THE BETTER!
Just goes to show that all the best stories come out of the sketchy moments. imagine coming home and saying “nope, all went to to plan”. really admire your spirit of adventure guys, love you both to bits.
James xx
Cheers James, we gather you’re out and about again in the jungle? xx