Peninsula

The latest deal on the Peninsula is that many cars couldn't handle the steep bypass, so started taking their chances using the main road, despite the instability of the cliff (and the orange cones there trying to dissuade them; the wamba boulder has been moved off to the side). Rock & Dirt cleared an old road (mainly used by goats & hikers these days) to allow non-4-wheel drive vehicles to traverse the hill, but it's still slow going and will be a mess in the next rain (assuming they don't do more to shore it up).



Between the pot holes (you can't even swerve to avoid them anymore, because you just swerve into another one), the overgrown foliage (the prickly overgrown foliage), and now this "at your own risk" cut to get to the Peninsula, the businesses on the southeast side are really going to take a hit. As it is, taxis have already told those businesses that they won't take passengers down there after dark because it's too dangerous and hard on their vehicles. Hmm - you can't go west because of crime or east because of the crappy roads. What's it take to get the government interested in the plight of its people and their enterprises, for Pete's sake?

Still pretty though.

Rock Slide!

It seems I spoke too soon on the puny rocks that fell during TS Irene on the Timothy Hill mountain pass. Today the cliff just couldn't take it anymore (WINNFM suggested a small earthquake tremor was a factor, but there's no evidence we had one) and this happened (thanks Liz & Michael):

Did you click on the 1st picture and see the people standing there? Those boulders are HUGE! Good thing no one happened to be passing by on foot or by car when that occurred. There is another way to/from the Southeast Peninsula, but it's a slow one (and not all that solid itself). As a matter of fact, the government is saying to take the "bypass" at your own risk. According to WINNFM, more boulders are teetering and someone is trying to make the bypass safer. I think that cliff could use some shoring up. Remember that fissure picture I showed you from the previous post? S-c-a-r-y!

Someone farther down the peninsula not having a good day either. No one was injured.

I just saw an article from Barbados about all that seaweed I mentioned before too. Other islands also got swamped by it and are worried about sea life and tourism (article). Of course, this all seems rather puny considering what the Turks & Caicos and Bahamas are about to endure. And a 5.8 earthquake just hit the East Coast?? Crazy!!!


NOTE TO MARY KENNEDY: Since I don't have your email, I'll just answer you here. The Marriott has been here since 2006 and is in Frigate Bay, not necessarily "near" Ross, but not that far either. I'm not aware of anyone offering special rates to students or their relatives, but here's some specials Marriott is running for $98/night and any others I know of are on my Activities page. I would think that the Marriott, Timothy Bay Resort, or Ocean Terrace Inn would be your best bets.

TS Irene Update

At 9:30am, we were in a calm spot and the radar actually looked like we might have some clearing by afternoon.  And then the power went out.  For exactly an hour.  Hmm, I see a pattern here. So we decided to head out and see what there was to see.   I figured you might want some pictures other than radar snippets too. I know I have a lot of readers who have 2nd homes here. I can't speak for the homes in the mountains, but everything east of Basseterre looked ok.


The road right outside our place was flowing quite nicely.

The Marriott turnabout was flooded as usual, but nothing out of the ordinary.

What was fun though was that we were in the Rover and were able to Baja through it.

We took a quick turn down S Frigate Bay/The Strip to see how it was faring and found a little flooding there and a surprising amount of wind. I doubt it was over 35 knots, but it was definitely the windiest place we encountered during our island reconnaissance. There were actually a few asphalt shingles coming off the Shiggidy Shack office roof as well as some from the roof of the bar behind it. Nothing major, but a few small flaps flapping in the wind. All awnings were up and unharmed.

The sea was very choppy but the waves were nothing like during the past couple of storms.

Then we headed up Timothy Hill. These waterfalls were plentiful all the way down the Peninsula. Pretty.

A look toward the Marriott showed lots of whitecapping over reef. What was more amazing was the amount of seaweed washing ashore (on N Frigate Bay). This will become the theme of the blog post as seaweed was in bountiful supply as we continued our tour.

Looking toward the Peninsula, the weather was still crummy.

N Friar's Bay had incredible waves coming in...and seaweed.

We drove to the beach and were just mesmerized by the breaking waves. They were probably about 10 feet here.

Then we cut across to S Friar's beach and took a quick look at Shipwreck. It wasn't even half as windy as The Strip had been, but there were a few branches down. I'm guessing the palm fronds were removed from the beach shade trees on purpose.

As we continued on we were surprised at how low the clouds were. These are pretty puny hills.

A look back toward Basseterre showed continued ugliness.

Unfortunately, Michael noticed a few downed newly planted palms he's going to have to deal with.

Sandy Bank was surprisingly calm for being on the ocean, particularly after we saw what had been going on at N Friar's. No real wind either, although there had to have been gusts at one point because some new plants were toppled over.

We did a quick exploration of the surrounding hills for some contractors and got a bird's eye view of Sandy Bank as well. The water was tinted orange from all the...you guessed it...seaweed.

The road toward Turtle Beach was flooded, but passable.

Turtle Beach was rougher and a bit windier than most of our other stops, but still nothing major.

I know you're sick of hearing about seaweed, but this slop was so thick that it extended several feet into the sea.

Nothing major happening at Major's Bay either (Hey! What's missing from this photo? -The shore here was clean!). Nevis under a cloud.

We decided to skip Cockleshell Beach figuring it would look similar to what we'd already seen. On our way back, we noticed that one of the ferries had taken refuge in Ballast Bay. Told you it wasn't all that rough.

Michael checked the range gauge at his compound and it had captured 2.1" of water since yesterday afternoon. I'm sure it's safe to say that the mountains got a lot more than that. When heading back up Timothy, we notice a few more rocks in the road than were there on our first pass.

I really hate this fissure...

Curious about the ocean beaches northwest of the island, we drove to Keys Beach and were not disappointed. Wow. The waves were at least 12' here.

We even took a short video for you so you could get the feel for it. It was windy here, but probably more like 20-25 knots.

A peak further down the coast showed it was no better.

So that's it. We turned around and I've been trying to get this info posted ever since. We took the pictures between 11am and noon and the rain has stopped on our end of the island for now. We haven't heard of any mudslides or anything in the country but can update later if we find out anything. The radar still shows moisture out and about, but the worst of it should be gone. Let's hope so. If it stops  now we got lucky once again. Wahoo!  If not, I'll post again...

TS Irene Arrives

Now how come I have that song Come on Eileen stuck in my head? This has been yet another interesting storm to watch and I'm not sure how much we're actually going to get from it.

On Thursday it hadn't looked pretty, but we'd seen the same red splotches before. On Friday, we had a pretty sunset at The Strip and did a last check of radar only to see that the the blob had completely disintegrated. Well, we'd seen that happen before too.

Saturday was a mishmash of sun and clouds and, of course, we were staring at the reborn splootch again. Mike went into work to tie down a few things and I finished whatever changes on the blog I had left. I'm actually really proud of myself - the drop down menu bar, the categories listing, and a # of other features required a lot of code and I managed to figure it out. I still have one issue but I'm going to have to give up on it because my editor has asked me to cut over 100 pages from my book. Sigh. Anywho, where were we on the storm?

About 5:30pm on Sat we got some rain for about an hour but then that switched to just lightning. At 6:30, even though the thunder was quite a distance from the strikes, I decided to get my flashlight ready and sure enough at exactly 7pm the power went out for an hour. The rest of the night was very quiet.

I woke up just before midnight to stillness. Thinking maybe we had avoided the darn thing, I realized that, in fact, the storm was still out there and was now called Tropical Storm Irene. We were under a Tropical Storm Warning.



Here's what it looked like then:



Even from a distance the thing looked big.

Looking at the radar, it looked like Guadeloupe would get the worst of it really. But I closed a few more windows and brought some stuff from the outside patios indoors. Michael slept on....

Blue is usually just cloud cover, green is rain and possible thunderstorms.






It is raining now and the winds are coming up.

The storm is to our east at the moment.

Rain totals are supposed to be 4-7 inches with winds for us from 34 (91%) - 50 (10%) knots. Well, let's see what happens, shall we? Right before I posted this, I took another check of radar (the thing is moving pretty quickly and what looks like the worst of it is northeast of us already).