Winter weather

We have had quite a wet fall. Someone today was telling me this was because it is a la Nina year. I hadn't heard that. But we picked up over an inch of rain in October, another 1/2 inch in November, and now we have a 'pineapple express' pounding the Southland. They're calling it a 'storm of the century' around here (which is funny to those of us from the East Coast who experienced the Storm of the Century that occurred in 1993) (but not to those people whose houses are now filling with mud). So far in December, I think we've gotten close to 2 inches. This is a lot of rain for us, especially this early in the wet season; the storminess is just starting.

We had a bloody awful crossing today, which was entirely unexpected. I tend to be quite obsessive in the winter about sea conditions, constantly checking the channel buoy to see the swell height and period and looking at the wind vectors. I had been reading the latest marine forecasts from the National Weather Service (4 to 6 foot swells with <2 ft wind waves, 10 to 15kt winds), and the buoy was looking reasonable (3-4 ft swells at about 9 seconds). In the morning, the wind was calm and the sea looked pretty calm. But at noon, the wind started howling, really howling. I was hoping it was just the tunnel effect we get at the Isthmus, and the the boats in the harbor didn't seem to be bouncing around on any big swell. So we board the boat at 3:30 (the wind's been going for about 3 hours now). I say something to the captain about how "it shouldn't be that bad out there", and he just smiles ruefully and shakes his head. I get the dread sense I have miscalculated somewhere.

The captain decides to hug the coast heading west before cutting north across the channel. When I've been on boats doing this before, it was in high seas and the captain was trying to put the boat in the trough of the swell for the crossing. In this case it was so we could get the wind behind us. This worked out pretty well, although the captain seemed to be working pretty hard to keep the boat surfing straight down the front of the swells. I didn't think the ride was too bad at that point. The captain and mate were talking about how the swell was coming from a different direction than was typical. This led to the complication of us being pushed much further west on our course than planned, so when we got to the other side of the channel, we needed to cut east, which put us sort of side-on to the swell. The mate was sent below to the main cabin to tell the passengers that the ride was about to get rougher, and it did. It was only seven miles, but it was a hard seven miles. Several of the people downstairs got sick (including half of my family), but we made it. Thank goodness it's only a 90 minute trip. Everyone was feeling a little wonky getting off the boat.

Angry, angry ocean. No fun.