Well, I’ve just experienced my first hurricane. Dennis came sweeping up out of the Caribbean over the last couple of days, charging straight over Cuba and then heading up into the Gulf Of Mexico, missing Key West by about 40 miles. The lower Keys were evacuated but apparently there wasn’t too much damage with only a two-foot storm surge.
Here in Fort Lauderdale it was quite ominous on Thursday night as the sky was very dramatic indeed at sunset, with lots of huge angry-looking swirly clouds and strange pinks and reds. Later that night the wind really picked up and the palm trees started whipping around, with bits falling off and tumbling down the streets.
The wind carried on blowing pretty hard all day on Friday which meant that unfortunately my main mast couldn’t be stepped, so that’s yet another delay. Never mind, it’s quite exciting staying here with all this weather going on!
Actually it makes CNN very boring as they’ve only got two stories at the moment – the hurricane and the bombs in London. People here keep saying how sorry they are and expressing concern for my family and ‘loved ones’, whoever thay are, and seem a bit shocked when I just shrug nonchalently and say we’ve been bombed since the 70s so it’s nothing new, and this latest lot is the price we pay for shacking up with Bush. So his “War On Terror” is making the world a safer place, is it?!
Anyway, moving swiftly on as politics and computers don’t mix, let’s get back to the weather. Today the worst of it had passed and the eye of the storm is now heading straight for Alabama so we can forget all about it as there’s nothing there worth worrying about.
I just hope this isn’t the start of a whole string of hurricanes like last year as I might end up stranded here all summer with nothing to do but go gallivanting around the local nightlife. Oh, despair and desolation! How would I cope with 3 more months of that, I wonder?!