Weather...or Not

Django and friends in Tyrrel Bay, Carriacou

We awoke on Saturday morning in plenty of time for Chris Parker’s weather forecast from the Caribbean Weather Center aboard his vessel Bel Ami (which, being an American, he pronounces Bellamy). He said the southeast Caribbean was in the midst of an enhanced tropical wave and that another, extending from the Azores to Guyana, was moving down across the Atlantic. He predicted a day or two of peace in midweek before this second system washed over our area.

Before going further, I need to explain that a tropical wave has nothing to do with a row of people on an island with palm trees standing up, waving their arms, and sitting again in sequence. Here beginneth the lesson (and bear with me, I’ll do my best but I’m no meteorologist).

It’s all about keeping the middle warm. When the equator gets too warm, the world has a very clever cooling mechanism, better known as a tropical cyclone (called hurricanes in the Americas, typhoons in the Orient). These form when heat at the equator hasn’t been moved to the poles efficiently enough and water temperatures rise. These cyclones consume vast amounts of energy and leave cooling in their wake.

Your basic tropical cyclone begins life as a little tropical wave which is a westerly moving weather system or trough. A combination of water temperature (over 80F) and wind characteristics allow this little proto-cyclone to develop a bit of muscle and vertical growth. Then the Coriolis effect, produced by the earth’s rotation, kicks in to give it spin, at which point the system is called a tropical depression (no, it’s not sad, it is just a low-pressure area). From this state it can then advance to become a tropical storm and, eventually, a tropical cyclone. The distinctions are mainly in the wind speeds.

Ok, now that I’ve alarmed you all by using the H-word, let me reassure you that the vast majority of tropical waves never get past kindergarten. They can only dream of the tropical depression they will never be. That said, they are still pretty dreary things to be sitting in the middle of. Mind you, WW went on a provisioning run and said to the shopkeeper, “Nasty weather.”

“What?” she said. “It’s not nasty, it’s cooool.”

Which is true. Even a little baby tropical wave is a very effective cooling device. So if you’re into howling winds and hammering rain broken by intermittent periods of lowering clouds and calm, a tropical wave is where you want to be. Oh, and this pleasure persists for several days.

I’m not sure what an enhanced tropical wave is, but if Chris Parker says this one is enhanced, I believe it.

This morning (Monday, November 17), Mr. Parker launched his weather report with “The weather in the southeastern Caribbean is nasty.” He then narrowed the focus to the Grenadines. Well, Carriacou is geopolitically part of Grenada, but geographically, it is one of the Grenadines. And here we are. He said that we are in an intertropical convergence zone (or ITCZ as we in the know term it)...whatever that may be. I think he really nailed the general term to cover the whole experience: nasty.

But nasty in a “sitting on a boat in the Caribbean” sort of way, not in a “middle of a blizzard with no power” sort of way.

By way of breaking the boat-bound monotony, we went for a lovely long walk today, up into the hills behind Tyrrell Bay and down to the south where we had a magnificent view out over the sea to Grenada.

View south toward Grenada

WW remembers visiting here some 20 years ago and meeting with locals in their tiny one- or two-room shacks back in the hills, all cleared areas littered with turtle shells. Today, only crumbling cement work marks where most of these dwellings have gone; larger houses are in vogue. And the turtle shells have been replaced by a horde of free-ranging goats.

The Goat Family is receiving

He found almost no trace of the Carriacou of his memory. It was, regardless, a lovely walk and we lunched at the Carriacou Yacht Club on our way back to Django.

The road down to Tyrrel Bay

As I mentioned earlier, there’s more weather on the way, with that second tropical wave moving down straight for us. So we’ve talked with our guests and will now meet them in Grenada instead of St. Vincent. Yes, we are going to turn around and run away. Pathetic. What would Captain Aubrey say?

He’d probably commend us for choosing the lesser of two weevils.