Happy Labor Day

A Day Without Caffeine?

As soon as I woke up I knew it was going to be a decaffeinated day.

It was dark. Pitch black. "That's not right," I thought. "Where are those big red digital numbers on my alarm clock?" It took me a moment or two to collect my thoughts. Then I got it. Another damn power cut. We had two last Sunday, but that was during a hurricane. There was no hurricane today. How could we have a power cut without a hurricane? "Uh oh," I said, apparently out loud. "Yes, it went off at five o'clock," said my wife from the darkness beside me. How would she know that? She must have been awake looking at her clock when the power went off, I guess.

I lay in the dark. I wasn't going to go back to sleep now. I needed a cup of coffee. The first think I do every day when I wake up is make some coffee for both of us and we drink it in bed while she reads her book and I do another couple of puzzles in my MENSA Absolutely Nasty Level 4 Sudoku book. Hey, use it or lose it! But how am I going to make a cup of coffee with no power? Hmmm. I guess I could boil some water in a pan on the gas stove and make some instant coffee. But then I would still have to open the fridge to get the milk out, and someone told me last weekend that you should never open the fridge when the power is off because you never know how long it is going to be off and once you have let warm air into the fridge all the food will spoil. Damn!

I lay in the dark and thought about how much I needed my cup of coffee. Maybe we should get up and drive around until we find somewhere open that sells coffee and possibly breakfast too? I wondered how extensive the power cut was. Are our neighbors off too? I got up. I looked through the curtains. There were no lights on in any of the houses around us. But it was only just after five o'clock so what did that prove? Maybe the power company doesn't know about the outage yet? Maybe I should report it? Where's the flashlight?

My wife found a flashlight and I went off to find an electricity bill to find the phone number to which to report power outages. I looked in my office filing cabinet. Duh! Of course I don't have any electricity bills. I went to paperless billing years ago. All my electricity bills are on the Internet. And the cable modem is down because we have a power cut. Duh! Eventually I found the number to report power cuts on another notice from the power company and dialled it. I was really needing my coffee by now...

I spoke with a very friendly machine at the power company's phone number. I pressed "1" in answer to one question and then "8" in answer to another. Then the machine wanted to know the phone number associated with this account. Hmmm. I wonder which of our several numbers that would be? Or failing that I could tell the friendly machine the account number that is printed on the electricty bill (which of course I don't have.) I guessed which phone number we had used when we opened the account and I guessed right. Now the friendly machine wanted to know if my neighbors had power cuts too. "Please say Yes, No or I Don't Know." I said, "I Don't Know." The machine didn't understand me. I said, "I Don't Know," again. The machine still didn't understand me. I really needed my coffee by now. Eventually the machine let me press "3" to indicate that I had no clue as to whether my neighbors had power and that I wasn't going to call them at 5am on a Sunday morning to find out. The friendly machine thanked me and wished me a good day. Hmmm.

I went back to bed and daydreamed about coffee. I wondered how long we would be without power. My son was without power for four whole days this week. Maybe we would have to go and move in with him if it's going to be that bad? My other son and his wife and my minus-two-month-old grandchild are coming to visit us today. If power doesn't come back soon I will have to call them and tell them not to come. Maybe we should go and visit them instead? I was desperate for coffee by now.

Just after 6 o'clock the power came back on. I got up. I made coffee. I went back to bed and drank coffee and completed a couple of MENSA Absolutely Nasty Level 4 Sudoku puzzles.

Carol Anne made me do it.

Sailing Quote of the Week

"Alaska isn’t known for its pumpkin pie." - Matt Rutherford in yesterday's post on his blog Solo Around the Americas. Matt is attempting to sail solo around the Americas, including sailing single-handed east to west through the the Northwest Passage this summer. He is currently trying to ride out an enormous storm system before sailing south through the Bering Strait.

The full quote is "Well, Alaska isn’t known for its pumpkin pie. It's known for its big mountains and big seas. I don’t think it will let me down."

Don't Read This

Don't you just hate it when a blogger writes one of those posts that basically says not much has happened in their life in the last few weeks or in the area of their life that their blog is about in the last few weeks, and that they are sorry that they haven't blogged much but they have been too busy, too lazy or too drunk to blog, and so there's not much to report... but then they go and write a couple of thousand words whining about life in general anyway?

I hate those posts.

This is one of those posts.

Don't read it.



So... I sailed a lot in late June, July and early August. Did a lot of regattas. Didn't win any. Not a surprise. That's OK.

The last regatta I sailed, and the last one I wrote about here was Buzzards Bay which was a light air day, a windy day, and a blown-out, rained out day.

All in all I was pretty pleased with my sailing in those six weeks or so. Apart from the day of the attack of hand cramps at the Atlantic Coast Masters I managed to complete every race at the regattas I sailed. I suffered through the frustration of long light air, shifty days and I toughed it out with the best of them on windy days, and so I am starting to believe that I may not totally have lost it, in spite of some doubts on that score after my fiasco at Hayling Island last year.

Then I kinda sorta took it easy in August as far as Laser sailing is concerned (and as far as pretty much everything else is concerned.) After traveling all over the area to sail earlier in the summer - and spending a memorable week with my grand-kids on the beach in Cape Cod - on my return to this little corner of Narragansett Bay I discovered that I really do live in one of the most beautiful places in the world. I drove down to Seapowet Beach on the Sakonnet River to go for a run and was blown away by the quiet, wild charms of the middle Sakonnet. There's no place quite like it. So I went sailing by myself there the next day and soaked up the atmosphere.

The attendance at Tuesday night sailing in Bristol has been really down this year, partly because some of the key members of the fleet have been off travelling to major regattas, or off somewhere else training for major regatta, or relaxing at home recovering from sailing in major regattas. I did enjoy one evening in August of light air practice on Bristol Harbor with one other sailor. Another week the wind was flat calm on Tuesday so I went for a blast by myself in Bristol on Wednesday morning. I have been trying to drum up interest in Tuesdays in Bristol but I've been a dismal failure as a cheerleader. Excuses for not sailing with me have ranged from "I tried kite-surfing at the weekend and now I ache all over" (Duh!) to "I need to paint the house before the hurricane comes." (What difference an extra coat of paint makes when a hurricane is trying to blow your house down is beyond me.)

Ah yes, the hurricane. Irene blew through the area last weekend. Blew some boats off their moorings in Bristol. Blew over some boats on the land at the marina in Bristol. Caused a bit of flooding. Blew down lots of trees. And cut off power to hundreds of thousands of people. My wife kept saying she thought Hurricane Irene was going to be a "damp squid" (sic). It wasn't.

A damp squid. (Not Irene.)

My son and his family were some of the unlucky ones who were without power for four whole days. So they came and stayed with us, which meant that we got to look after our three little grand-kids while their parents were at work. Phew! That was harder than any of the sailing I've done this year. How do parents do it? How did we do it thirty years ago? I never realized that playing with a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old all day was so exhausting. Or so much fun.

Talking of exhaustion, I've been trying to get my half-marathon training back on schedule after slacking off a bit when I was sailing all those regattas. I tried to pick up where I had left off many weeks before. Bad idea! Attempted a 15 mile run, but could only manage 8 miles. Seems like running fitness wears off more quickly than I thought. So I scaled back my ambitions and started building up the mileage slowly again. Did a 10 mile run the next week. Then I did something totally moronic. But that's a story for another post....



You didn't really read this post did you? You can't say I didn't warn you.

I'm a Laser Sailor

I think someone is taking the piss out of me.

I'm a Runner

All Weather Is Local (I Hope)

I expect that I'm not the only person in the north-eastern US who has been watching, and listening to, and checking out online the weather forecasts over the last few days. As Hurricane Irene approaches of course I want to know how bad the winds will be. What can we expect?

It was only when I started looking at the various wind forecasts available on SailFlow that I realized something that I suppose I already knew from sailing. All weather is local. There is more wind on one side of the course. There is a dead patch in the lee of that headland. Etc. Etc.

And if SailFlow is to believed, this is just as true in a hurricane. What winds you are actually going to experience in any given location - your home, your boat anchorage - are highly dependent on the immediate geography, the shape of the land, the height of the hills near that location.

So what does it mean when I look at the National Weather Service forecast for Narragansett Bay and it says ".sun...se winds 45 to 55 kt...becoming s 50 to 60 kt in the afternoon. gusts up to 80 kt." Gusts up to 80 knots? But where? Everywhere on the bay and its surrounding coasts? I think not.

I discovered that the SailFlow website actually has wind forecast weather maps available using several different models, and that for an area like Narragansett Bay, small bays with lots of islands and inlets, the forecast wind patterns vary enormously depending on the "resolution" of the computer model being used. To quote from the SailFlow site...

Why does the grid resolution of the model matter?

The coastal zone is where computer weather models perform the worst. The primary reason for this is the complexities between water and land temperatures as well as friction and topography. When choosing a model to try to predict the weather in this area it is important to use one that can actually "see" the body of water that your going to be on.

Let's look at some examples for Sunday's forecast based on models of different resolution.

First, to orient you, here is Sailflow's chart of the current winds in my area...

You can see one of my favorite sailing spots, Bristol Harbor, in the center of the chart, Mount Hope Bay and Sakonnet River on the right, and Narragansett Bay and Providence River on the left. I live on the eastern shore of Mount Hope Bay.

Now let's look at the forecast for 8am tomorrow morning, using the NAM 12k model (meaning the grid resolution of the computer model is 12 kilometers.)

And also at the same model for 5pm...

But what if we use a model with a much higher resolution for the same times, the WRAMS model which has a resolution of 2k?

First 8am...

And then 5pm...

Could there be a bigger contrast? The low resolution NAM model is showing consistently strong winds (up to 40 knots+) across the area, slackening off slightly as you go further north (away from the ocean.)

Whereas the higher resolution WRAMS model shows similarly strong winds in the middle of the bays, but significantly lower wind speeds over the land and on the sides of the bays in the lee of the land. (Of course, this is obvious to any sailor.) Most importantly for me, it shows the winds on the eastern shore of Mount Hope Bay as never more than 20 knots or so.

Hmmm.

NWS says gusts up to 80 knots.

The NAM model says 40+ knots all over this area.

The WRAMS model says no more than about 20 knots near my house.

Who to believe? I know which model I want to believe!

More background on these models and why they differ on the SailFlow website.

If History Repeats Itself...

Hmmmm. That helps a lot!

1938 Hurricane

Flying Bob

It is currently looking likely that Hurricane Irene will make landfall in Southern New England on Sunday night while still a Category 1 or 2 Hurricane. I have no experience as to what to expect.

20 years ago this week, Hurricane Bob hit this area. This photo was taken in Boston.

Hmmm.

I guess we do need to batten down the hatches. Whatever that means.