I do realize that I have been quiet here as of late, please forgive my absence, life has been quite boring here lately. I do not tend to write when I have nothing to say, or nothing interesting to say. The most recent moment of interest approaching is the end of Hurricane season, permission to sail again.
As the Captain of this vessel I have begun wearing my Captains hat recently and started to pay attention to the weather. We are so very bored lounging around in the safety and brutal heat of Luperon bay, and as of late, it really feels like we are just wasting our lives away.
I know this will sound incredible to any of you who have been following me for any length of time… but I think I miss sailing… maybe I would even go so far as to say I WANT to go sailing… almost like the sailing infection inside my blood has begun to rise to the surface. I crave to go sailing out there in the Ocean again… I actually miss it… !
This slow internal shift has surprised even me, yep I’m shocked too. Just 4 months ago I was sick of sailing and dreaded it everyday, hated sailing and never wanted to sail again. I guess I just really needed this rest.
I have never seen a Hurricane before, and certainly NEVER NEVER want to see a hurricane from the deck of my boat… but we want to go sailing… can we go yet? When is it going to be “Safe” to go sailing?
I think that whenever we start talking in terms of “Normal” behaviour for mother nature we must be cognizant that we are on bad ground, mother has no respect for “Normal moods”. Global warming has thrown every notion of “Normal weather patterns” akimbo. European boat insurance companies define the end of Hurricane season for this area as being Dec 1st, I believe American insurance companies will not even cover sailing the Caribbean before November 15th…. BUT…
The big giant question that has been preoccupying me lately is… what is happening right now…? this year…? in the next month what will happen…?
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Risk assessment
Sailors in the Caribbean tend to pay a lot of attention to the Hurricane season and so far… mom has been remarkably calm, almost suspiciously calm. We have had no Hurricanes here this year at all. So maybe this will be the calmest hurricane season in the last hundred years? Just as she can have bad moods mother can also have good moods.
The normal general path for Hurricanes is that they form off the coast of Africa and ride the trade winds westward into the warm shallow waters of the Caribbean, where they suck up enormous potential energy and become monsters that ravage these islands. Sometimes they do spontaneously form in the gulf of Mexico, sometimes they cross over Mexico from the pacific and make a mess of Louisiana and New Orleans, but these exceptions do not concern us here for the moment.
What we on WildChild are concerned with is potential hurricanes that might affect us. Although I often say I only have the loosest of plans, our current loose plan is to finish seeing the rest of the Caribbean islands. We want to leave here and head to Peurto Rico, maybe the BVI’s, Saint-Martin and then go south.
You can see the North Atlantic is still swirling the nasty purple arctic winds that I sailed in last year, the jet stream is sliding down, but no lower than expected. So for next week there appears to be no hurricanes coming yet.
You can see that it is probably a bad idea to be sailing off the coast of England or Spain but… it looks like there are no hurricanes at all coming towards us here in the Caribbean in the month of October at all.
So the available data seems to be telling me we are set to leave right now if we want to… but how much do we trust a forecast looking 6 days into the future? Would you bet your life on this data?
Will there still be a hurricane coming here in November?
We need to try and predict the future. The thing with sailing is that there is never any guarantee of safety out here. We can only analyze the available data, make a risk assessment based upon odds of probability, and at some point… make a leap of faith.
Hmmmm….
But Captain Lexi is a big chicken and I really do not want to die out here sailing, I truly hate making captain mistakes… they tend to hurt.
I asked Elena to be responsible for analyzing all this boring data and making a perfect decision by accurately predicting the future… unsurprisingly she declined. The responsibility for this rests entirely on my shoulders, as always. I think sailing might be more enjoyable if I was not the captain always responsible for everything, the weight of it just crushes me constantly.
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OK …. so let’s predict the future.
I figure it would not hurt to look at historical Hurricane data and draw some reasonable odds of probability conclusions. You can see there have been many hurricanes thru this area and Hurricanes are a real threat…
but…
If we narrow the data set down to something more useful to our question at hand, I asked the computer to only show me Hurricanes that have come within 200 miles of Peurto Rico in the month of November. In the last 170 years that the record extends there have only been 7 November hurricanes here ever.
So pure math tells us there is a 7 / 170 chance or a
1 in 24 Chance of a November hurricane hitting us this year.
Purely statistically speaking of course. I varied the search parameters for other nearby geographic locations and found nearly identical results further south.
So… what other information might indicate to us what kind of mood mother will be in this November?
What worries me is that Mother has not been in a normal mood down here in the Dominican Republic this year. They experienced their worst drought in 50 years this year, with super hot sunny weather for months on end as the last rainy season did not happen.
Norm tells us that usually November / December is the rainy season here, but we had an uncharacteristic 2 week rainy period here at the end of September. Clearly moms mood has not been “Normal” for this area this year. Maybe Mother natures current weird calmness does not mean that she is in a calm mood this year but rather her mood for Hurricanes might be shifted ahead on the calendar. Last year in the North Winter came earlier than ever, maybe this year Hurricane season will come later than ever?
I am so nervous to make this educated prediction for WildChild…
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Our current dilemma
We are very bored and we really want to go sailing.
It seems like the Oceans are calm and there are no Hurricanes predicted to come for the rest of this month.
Statistically it is pretty safe for us to go sailing from here in November.
Should we bet our lives on this guess though…? Would you bet your life on this? Would you go?
Well there is the argument just play it safe and waste another month of your life waiting in the safety of Luperon bay, go in December then you are sure you will be safe.
Well… I looked that up too and it turns out you are not even guaranteed hurricane safety if you wait until December. There have been 2 hurricanes in this area in December in the last 170 years, so there is still a 1 in 85 chance of getting pummeled by a hurricane in December anyways. In sailing there is never any guarantee of safety. Us sailors are always taking risks out here on the ocean. We are adventurous people who are not risk adverse, we just calculate our own risk tolerances. The very act of sailing is inherently dangerous.
I am 100% sure I NEVER want to get hit by a hurricane…
I am currently 75% sure there will not be a hurricane here in November.
As we get to November first I can look ahead 10 days of forecasts and see what it tells me… but if it is still predicted to be hurricane free for the foreseeable future, until the middle of November…. should we go?
What odds of probability of safety will we feel comfortable risking our lives on?
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Boring stuff
I realize that this has been one of the most boring blogs I have written in a long time. This is a sailors website, our sailing channel remains primarily about sailing adventure. This is the reality of being a sailor. If you ever intend to become a sailing captain, you had better study learn and excel at this stuff, because 50% of all sailor mistakes are made in the planning stage, and getting this wrong can be extremely dangerous and usually physically uncomfortable. If you get this wrong you will suffer. If you someday become a sailboat captain you will need to learn this stuff. Boring or not studying this crap is so very important.
Cheers Sailors
Captain Lexi…
… the very mentally preoccupied with this data …