Weather

There are a few weather risks staying in the sea this summer. First is heat and humidity. Oh my god there have been days over 100 and all you can do is hang out in the water. One unforeseen advantage of having a catamaran is being able to hang out in the water in the shade under the boat between the hulls.

Another risk is “Chubascos” which are short duration violent squalls that can kick up with little warning in the evening or middle of the night with winds up to 50 knots with thunder and lightning. We think we had a Chubasco a couple weeks ago when we were at Isla Cornados. We had a spectacular lightning show that got very close. I went back to bed but Tim said it came as close as in the bay with us. Then the winds picked up to about 30 kts from the N, which is about the most we’ve seen at anchor so far in our trip. The worst part is the wind died and shifted to the SE but we still had swell from the North winds so we were getting rocked pretty good with swell from the side.

And of course the third risk is tropical storms/hurricanes. It’s very rare for one to come up into the sea as high as we will be going but we have to be prepared. Hurricanes can have much stronger winds but on the other hand you usually know they are coming days in advance. There have been 5 named tropical storms so far this season and the last one (Erick) made it as far north as the tip of Baja. We, well, mostly me, have become incessant weather watchers. There are radio nets with weather reports and a low bandwidth document service where you can download weather info from the national hurricane center in FLA.

Not weather-related, but something that is driving us absolutely crazy right now are the bees! They come looking for freshwater and if they find a drop they go tell all their friends and then it really gets fun. I’m not proud to say we have committed what could be considered bee genocide on more than one occasion. Most cruisers have similar stories of how they tried to help the bees or shoo them away without killing them at first, but at some point, after you have been stung a half dozen times or so, you just can’t take it anymore. Lady Carolina (our buddy kid boat) uses the vacuum cleaner on them.