RIDERS ON THE STORM

I spent most of January cruising in the British, U.S. and Spanish Virigin Islands. Even though the Jonas Blizzard/Nor' Easter that hit the United States east coast last week was 1500 miles away. My cruising trip in the Caribbean was affected by it's formation over the Atlantic. The easterly winds we had been enjoying since we started sailing on January 12th suddenly started to veer out of the south. As shown in the video below. The X on the video shows the approximate location of the boat I was on:



I was feeling pretty good as I first heard of the storm approaching the northeast area.   I had recently left the northeast to spend a few weeks cruising in the warm Caribbean to escape part of winter. I did not expect the storm being 1500 miles away for it to impact my travels on board. But, when the winds switched to the south and started to feed into the storm the waves also picked up. When the reefs along Culebra  were hit by waves it made for very poor visibilty for snorkeling for several days. Though on the plus side we did have a nice sail over to Fajardo from Culebra. Though it was a sobering lesson on how powerful these winter storms can be.

YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN

The unstayed mast of BIANKA whips around pretty good. So good that the wind anemometer on top seemed to fail every other year. So I got rid of it and sailed by the feel of the wind on my cheek for a few years. Which worked fine though there were times I would have liked to know what the wind speed really was doing with a little more accuracy.  So this year I bought a cheap  handheld Anemometer.

It works pretty well and is small enough to keep handy in the cockpit when my curiosity on the wind speed is heightened. Another reason I bought it was to try and calibrate the amp readings for the 48 volt Marine AirX wind turbine to the wind speed. It's Pretty accurate but, being a cruiser even ballpark is fine as far as I'm concerned. So during some recent windy days I used the Anemometer to come up with the following readings on the wind turbine amp reading. Then using a P Touch Labeler made labels for the readings. Just another tool to use that will give me a rough guide when it's time to reef or just gauge the wind speed: