5/21/02 | Change in the weather

The entire time we've been in the Bay Islands, the trade winds have blown relentlessly. There has been some diurnal land effect -- generally the wind decreases sometime in the night, and doesn't pick up to its full strength until around noon -- but otherwise we can pretty much count on 20-25 knots of wind from within a few points of due east. (Except when it blows 25-30!) The weather forecasts we get from the US National Weather Service have become a bit of a joke; they always say more or less the same thing, and they are always wrong. Fortunately, they are consistently wrong, so we just add 10 knots to whatever the forecast calls for.

The shortcomings of the forecasts are not entirely the fault of the NWS. Part of the problem is that the marine forecasts cover such a large area that local variations are lost in the noise. Another issue is the paucity of data available in this area. One part of the morning SSB net that we always pay attention to is the weather reports from boats underway and from various anchorages. Particularly when we're sitting in an anchorage where land effects dominate (such as at Cayos Cochinos), it's helpful to hear that the "10-15 from the east" of the official forecast is actually, according to the fellow who's sailing in it, 20 knots from the northeast. When we get back to the US, we might see about using our contacts at NOAA to see if we can get a project going to forward daily weather observations from cruisers back to NOAA, using existing ham-to-email gateways. It's the sort of thing that both hams and cruisers would be enthusiastic about; maybe we can get some enthusiasm going in the bureaucratic halls of officialdom, although that will be the hard part. But it's clear that the "eyes on the ground" are getting a much better picture of what's really happening with the weather.

The Northwest Caribbean doesn't always have such predictable, unpredicted weather. During the winter, the cold fronts which come south off the US make it all the way down here into the Gulf of Honduras. We're used to "northers" from our time in the Bahamas; typically, the wind ahead of the front slowly veers from east to south, even all the way to west for a while before dying off for a short time. When the front hits, it howls from the northwest or north, bringing rain squalls or at the very least big nasty-looking clouds, and then eventually the winds ease and clock east again. But this is May, and in May the cold fronts always stall out by the time they hit the Yucatan Channel. In fact there's one sitting there right now, stretched between Mexico and Cuba. Hurricane season, with its whole new set of weather possibilities, doesn't officially begin until June. Nothing but easterlies in May. Right?

Except that for the past three days, the wind has been howling from the west. We are huddled under a thick blanket of low cloud, and every so often we get hit by a rain squall, which brings the winds up from 15-20 knots to 20-25. Distant lightning streaks the sky. Anchored among the Water Cays west of Utila, with the meager protection of a few reefs and a tiny islet, we rock and roll nearly as much as if we were underway. We'd really like to move to a more protected anchorage, but the visibility is too poor. We keep expecting things to change, the sky to clear, the wind to shift decorously to the east, where it belongs. But all we get are slight nudges back and forth as the wind dances uncertainly between northwest and west-southwest, sometimes slackening, sometimes strengthening, but always from the west. (As I write this, it is pouring great bucketsful of rain, and blowing 22 knots from due west.)

From the reports on the morning SSB net, it's clear this is not a local effect. Voices on the radio range from disgusted to downright nervous. "One-hundred-and-ten percent cloud cover," reports one. "Fifteen to twenty knots out of the southwest, with two foot seas in the anchorage," grouses another. Boats in the other Bay Islands have west winds too, as do those in southern Belize and the offshore atolls. Further north along the Yucatan Peninsula the wind is from the north, in the wake of the cold front.

In fact, to us it looks suspiciously like a circulating low or tropical depression, centered somewhere in the vicinity of Grand Cayman. That's all we need, we mutter miserably to each other, a stupid hurricane that doesn't know it's not hurricane season yet. At least we're not in its path -- assuming it does the typical thing and moves north. And as of this morning, it looks like the National Weather Service is finally tumbling to the fact that something is going on here. The morning weatherfaxes show westerly wind in the Gulf of Honduras; of course, they are only calling for 5 knots, so they still don't have it quite right. The 24-hour and 48-hour forecasts indicate an obvious counterclockwise circulation in the Northwest Caribbean, and on the 72-hour forecast the forecaster has graciously put a big "L" right smack where we've been suspecting one should have been all along.

If this latest batch of forecasts is at least generally on target, we have no hope of moving on to Belize (west-northwest) anytime soon. Of course, the forecasts have never been particularly accurate for this area during the entire time we've been here. Since we had 20-knot westerlies when the forecasts called for 10-knot easterlies, we might get 15-knot easterlies instead of 5-knot westerlies. But I think it's more likely that the strong west winds will continue, along with the overcast and the rain squalls. We'll continue to look for a window to move to a better anchorage; there are a few slightly better protected spots in this general area, but if we want to be really comfortable we will have to go back to Roatan. In any event, we can't go anywhere safely (in particular, we can't get in to the best-protected bays on Roatan's south coast safely) until we get a little sunshine. So we're gritting our teeth and hanging on, waiting for another change in the weather.

(Postscript:  this afternoon it stopped raining long enough for us to try to make a break for it. Britt was worried about our anchor set, and we were pretty uncomfortable in the wide-open spot we'd moved to after leaving the little lagoon which we had almost not made it into. Ironically, the lagoon would have been a better place in these westerlies, so we planned to go back in. The funny thing was that the overcast eliminated the glare that had been the problem before, so the reefs were reasonably visible even in mid-afternoon. But just after we exited the reef area we were in, and turned toward the reefs bordering the lagoon, a series of squalls hit and there was no way we could see well enough through the pouring rain to make the narrow entrance. We stalled around for a while, but it was getting later and conditions were not improving, so we instead made our way back to Puerto Este on Utila. The gap in the reef here is much wider, and we also had the advantage of our previous GPS track which we could follow back in. The downside is that Puerto Este is wide open to the southwest swell, so in terms of comfort we are not too much better off than before! But the wind is cut somewhat by the bulk of the island, and we have a better bottom, and fewer hazards to drag into should we drag. We are also that much closer to Roatan, with an easier early-morning exit. Of course, by now we had expected to be in Belize, not backtracking to Roatan!)