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Home :: Newsletter |
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Weather Lessons
in Bimini "Chris Parker is calling for some nasty weather around the middle of the week," Dad said. Mom said, "Maybe you all shouldn’t go. You know, you can always drive up to Virginia and visit for your week off. Chris says that low forming over the Bahamas looks like it has the potential to be really nasty." |
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My boyfriend, Dan, my beagle, Stella, and I left Maule Lake at 00:15 on August 21 aboard Dan’s Ericson 27, bound for the Bahamas. We left my boat, a Columbia 28, in the marina. We planned to check in at Bimini, and continue on to Andros. We were equipped with every navigational tool imaginable: Dan’s Garmin plotter, a hand-held GPS, the Yachtsman’s Guide to the Bahamas (okay, so it was the 2004 edition), the Explorer Chartbook for the Near Bahamas, and Dave Kresge’s Vantage Point Guide to Bimini. The crossing took us 16 hours. We beat against the current all the way out Government Cut, and managed to snag a piece of polypropylene line in the prop somewhere along the way. At 05:00, we were on the edge of the Gulf Stream and Dan was in the water with a knife, cutting the line off in splintery chunks. While he and Stella slept for the next few hours, I thought about what my parents had said about the weather. Chris Parker, Caribbean weather expert, was usually right about this kind of thing. What if there really was a low forming just east of us? So far, the hurricane season had been normal—a few scares, but nothing serious. Then again, last year’s season didn’t get going until the end of August. Frances and Jeanne had destroyed my childhood home, the Gulfstar 47 Chez Nous, in Ft. Pierce, FL. I was still bitter over it. I forgot about the weather when, at 16:30, we pulled into Weech’s Dock in Bimini. Stella was overjoyed. She leapt off the boat and went running for the nearest tree. I leapt off the boat and chased her down before she had a chance to do her business. After all, we hadn’t cleared Customs yet, and neither of us was supposed to be ashore. The next two days flew by. We decided not to continue on to Andros, since it had taken us so long to cross the Gulf Stream. We wanted to relax and enjoy ourselves. Tuesday evening found us in Dollar Harbor at South Cat Cay. We’d found some conch earlier in the day, and I’d shown Dan how to clean them. He picked it up like he’d been doing it all his life. Both of us were starting to feel human again, far away from the madness of South Florida. We hadn’t listened to the weather since Sunday night.
"Tropical Depression Number 12 forms over the Bahamas…Currently located at 23.2 North and 75.5 West, or about 175 miles southeast of Nassau…moving towards the Northwest at 8 miles per hour…could become a tropical storm by Wednesday. The Government of the Bahamas has issued a tropical storm warning…" Our wine sat untouched on the cockpit seat, and my stomach started to churn. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. "Do you want to go back to Bimini tonight? We could follow our track into the harbor on the Garmin," Dan said. As nervous as I was about hurricanes, I was even more nervous about navigating shallow Bahamian waters at night. "No. Let’s listen to the weather first thing in the morning and go from there." The 17:00 advisory, issued on August 23, 2005, was the first official report on Katrina. On the 24th, we motored back into Bimini Harbor. It was three in the afternoon, and the sky was already clouding up. Tropical Depression Number 12 was now Tropical Storm Katrina, forecast to become a hurricane within 24 hours. The clouds were moving fast overhead, and their circular motion was becoming clearer and clearer. Weech’s Dock was empty, except for one small sloop that appeared to be a permanent fixture. As we pulled up, the dockmaster who had helped us on Sunday came running down the dock, waving frantically. "No, no, you can’t dock here," he yelled. "We’re not taking any boats during the storm." He told us to go to the Bimini Bluewater Marina. "Oh," he yelled as we backed off the dock, "and call your mom!" We settled into a slip at the Bluewater Marina. We were one of three American boats who had stayed in Bimini. Everyone else had the sense to flee back to the States. Dan and I busied ourselves with the boat--sails wrapped and tied, dinghy deflated and tied down, extra docklines, full water tank, full fuel tank, extra ice in the icebox--and I called my mom. She had called every marina in Bimini looking for us. The island was shut down. We spent most of the evening on Wednesday trying to find a bar with a TV so we could watch the Weather Channel.
At the Red Lion, the bartender turned on the TV for us. She said, "You Americans get so worked up about this kind of thing. It’s just another storm for us." All the same, her eyes were glued to the TV as fast as ours were. "My daughter lives in Miami," she said. Miami was in the center of the cone. We thought about what she’d said as we walked down to the End of the World Bar. Maybe she was right—everyone here seemed to be going about their business and getting ready for the storm. Nobody was panicking. We stopped at the boat to get Stella, who was welcomed at the End of the World. The bartender and the cook were deeply involved in a game of dominos, and Dan, Stella, and I had the place to ourselves. On the TV, one of the newscasters from Channel 7 in Miami barked about Katrina’s cone of error. I was disappointed to find that there was no $20 bill behind Dave Kresge’s business card on the wall, as he’d mentioned in his cruising guide. We spent the whole day Thursday reading and sleeping as the wind blew around us. Later in the day, when we emerged from the boat, nobody at the marina could believe that we’d stayed aboard. "You guys are crazy," our neighbor said. Katrina had become a hurricane almost on top of us, and by Thursday night she was on her way to Miami. I worried about my boat, which I’d left without doing any kind of hurricane preparation. We never saw any more than 65 mile per hour winds. Our marina in Miami had 90. Luckily, my boat was undamaged, thanks to the fellow liveaboards on my dock. We spent Friday exploring Bimini by land. The highlight of our stay at Bimini had to be meeting Piccolo Pete. He’s 93 and he used to fish with Hemingway. Friday evening found us upstairs at the tiny bar he owns, listening to an impromptu jam session. We left with the feeling that Bimini isn’t such a bad place to be stuck in a storm. An Afterthought… Back in the States, I sat in a North Miami Beach Laundromat on Monday, washing a week’s worth of clothes and staring at CNN. Katrina was pounding New Orleans, and that sick hurricane feeling rested in my stomach. I felt guilty for having a good time during the storm in Bimini. It had been small and tame when it passed over us, and now it was making history as one of the most disastrous storms ever. It was hard to believe that this was the small tropical depression that we hadn’t seen coming. To learn more about Chris Parker’s weather forecasts, go to his website. His book, Coastal and Offshore Weather, the Essential Handbook, is available at Bluewater Books & Charts.
And never, ever, go to the Bahamas without the Explorer Chartbooks. Period.
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But
the local NOAA weather said nothing about a low, and we’d been planning
this trip for a long time. The boat was stocked with food, everything
was shipshape, and Dan and I both needed a break from South Florida, school
and work. 
First
and foremost, I’ll admit this was stupid. Both of us know better. But
the NOAA weather hadn’t been calling for anything to develop, and I’d
almost forgotten what my mom had said about Chris Parker’s forecast. Since
we were so close to the States, we could get the weather from Miami on
the VHF. I turned it on and poured each of us a glass of wine.
We
wouldn’t have known to look up Piccolo Pete if it hadn’t been for 
