Damn It Freda Make Up Your Mind--Cyclone Season

Is it going to be this:

 

Or this:

Or something else entirely…

Weather watching is something we do more casually now that we are way up the Brisbane River and tied to pile moorings. We do get the occasional wild summer squall and after the devastating floods of 2011 we pay more than typical attention rain fall warnings. But big picture weather watching is something that occurs by happenstance—mainly when we’re checking weather for far flung friends.

We’ve been watching Cyclone Freda for several days though. Initially it looked like she'd hit New Caledonia then continue straight on to Auckland. Bummer for our friends there, but NZ typically has such crap weather they might not even notice a little cyclone. But then the models changed and showed Freda heading for us.

Brisbane does not have much of a history of cyclones, but I was curious what happens if they do get close. Through a quick search I learned about these storms:

1950 - Tracked to Sydney;

1954 - Crossed at Coolangatta

1963 - Cyclone Annie - Sunshine Coast

1964 - Cyclone Audrey - Travels from the Gulf To Coffs Harbour

1967 - Cyclone Dinah - Damage from Rockhampton to Grafton

1967 - Cyclone Barbara - Coolangatta to Lismore

1967 - Cyclone Elaine - Flooding at Logan/Brisbane

1967 - Cyclone Glenda - Off Brisbane 16 M waves recorded near the Gold Coast

1971 - Cyclone Dorra - Hit at Redcliffe

1972 - Cyclone Diasy - Hits Fraser - with Flooding to the Gold Coast

1974 - Cyclone Wanda - Huge flood in Brisbane

1974 - Cyclone Pam - Crosses 500 km east of Brisbane - was an intense system and caused severe flooding

1974 - Cyclone Zoe – Coolangatta (thinking Coolangatta is a bad place to live)

1984 - Cyclone Lance - Wind damage to the Gold Coast

1990 - Cyclone Nancy - crosses near Byron Bay

1993 - Cyclone Roger - Passed near Fraser - back out to sea before heading towards Southern NSW Brisbane Station records 13.2 waves

1994 - Cyclone Rewa - Passed 100 km out to sea and causes flash flooding

1998 - Cyclone Vale - Passes Brisbane and hits near Grafton

That’s just a sampling—for a bigger picture these are the storms which came within 200km of Brisbane in the past 100 years:

Then I started looking up the impact of each storm. Yes, just one of the many ways I like to terrify myself: looking up storm devastation in Australia over the past hundred years. This place is deadly. Back to Brisbane though--the take away seems to be this: Sometimes storms hit Brisbane, not super often though, but when they do it can be a big freaking deal or not.

The good news is even if Freda stays organized enough to hit us she shouldn't be very big. But just to be safe everyone chant with me: Freda, Freda go away...

Chubasco—the anatomy of a storm

This is what a storm looks like when it's breaking down. When it's pumping you don't turn on the computer and take a screen shot...

Last night we got the weather we’ve been hoping to avoid. When we pulled down the satellite images of the Sea of Cortez there were massive areas of convection on the mainland side, which were moving our way. After making our own forecast of, ‘we’re going to get smacked’ we checked Stan’s Chubasco forecast by SSB: 

“Tonight on the Mainland there is almost continuous convection on the beach from Mazatlan north to Kino. All of this convection is expanding and moving to the west. I don't think the convection will survive the trip across the Sea, but it might. So I would say there is a chance of a Chubasco all along the Baja peninsula. If it were me, I would go to bed early and get up at 1am local time and see what it looks like.”

Stan seemed a bit more optimistic than we felt, but we prepared the boat for a blow and I headed to bed. Just before Evan joined me we got a call by VHF from a boat anchored across the Sea in Guaymas—he let us know they had just been nailed by a Chubasco and that it was coming our way.

Around 11pm we were woken by chilly rain drops that felt as big as robin’s eggs. When a storm is strong enough, it blows out big rain drops, not the little ones associated with a typical approaching rain. Evan popped his head out the forward hatch and discovered that not only was the sky bright with lightning but a wall of rain was headed our way.

We both jumped up and went through the motions of preparing for a storm—I turned on the motor to relieve stress on the anchor in the gusts. And Evan closed hatches, got our instruments on, and lowered our lightening grounding system. Then he took over the wheel and I put as many of our electronics as would fit into the oven and then put the overflow into the pressure cooker—basically creating a low-tech Faraday Cage. (Check out this great article on lightning protection for tips and ideas.)

By now we had a steady 25-30 knots of wind. By Chubasco standards this was a small blow. What we had though was a lot of nearby lightning and cracking thunder. I took solace in the fact there are some tall mining structures near us (and a very tall mast on S/V Third Day), making it unlikely we’d take a direct hit. As the wind let up, the heavy rain continued—it looked like all that would happen in this blow is we’d get a good boat clean.

post-chubasco lightning--not as dramatic as mid-chubasco lightning, but we were busy then

 

After an hour, conditions eased and the storm seemed to have passed. But we were still seeing lots of lightning out to sea. When we fired up the computer, we discovered all we experienced was a very small cell that had broken off the main one—and that the huge area of convection that stretched from the mainland and ¾ of the way across the sea was still to come. Our guess was if that cell didn’t break down, we would be hit much harder within the hour.

I called the other boats in the anchorage to let them know the bad news (so they wouldn’t be caught off guard by a second storm). Then we waited, and waited. I dozed off and Evan later fell asleep while reading. The storm dissipated and as much as, ‘and nothing happened next’ doesn’t make for good story telling, it does make for good cruising…

Afternoon Adventures

Add two more anchored boats and you have how the anchorage looked during our blow

We’re hanging out in the Santa Rosalia area, enjoying the town and the internet. After we leave here we understand there’s one pay-(a lot)-as-you-go internet café in Bay of LA and that’s it. And considering I have a couple of research-heavy stories in the works, being in Santa Rosalia (or out at Isla Marcos where we can swim, fish and get Banda Anchas 3G service) is pretty much the best option as long as nothing too untoward is brewing in the south.

The problem with Santa Rosalia is it has a small, crowded, busy and very old (as in 140-years-old) harbour that has a bottom consistency of Jell-o. And not just your standard Jell-o; it’s more like that nasty Jell-o salad stuff, with chunks. So sometimes you hook a chunk (which could be anything from the wreck of a 19th century schooner to an old car) and sometimes your anchor simply drifts around in the Jell-o.

If all goes well, the boats at anchor (which are all crowded in a back corner) all drift around together and no one's the worse for it. But yesterday our flat calm, slight overcast day brought an afternoon blow that added some excitement to the place.

Big winds typically come at night; when people are home. But yesterday’s breeze picked up when half the folks were off their boats. And as the wind hit and we all pulled back into the sludge, some of us moved, and some of us didn’t. The first boat to start the slow drift was just upwind of us. We watched Francis Lee (whose owner Jesse was on shore) head straight between our bows, threatening to make us a trimaran.

As Francis Lee closed on us, we slipped out rode, until we were within a boat length of Third Day. But Third Day had nowhere to go because although Lori was aboard she couldn’t get the windless to work (and she also had a solid wall behind her). Meanwhile Hotspur was also on the move and was closing in on Third Day's port side. But Jim was aboard with 10-year-old Carolyne (who got a crash course in driving the boat in high winds and became a hero for the day).

Fortunately it’s a small town and Jesse got back to Frances Lee before she made any structural modifications to our hull. He picked up his anchor and moved. Jim picked up his and moved. Then for good measure we picked up ours to give Third Day a little space. While moving though we got garbage caught on our prop (the harbour is full of stuff…) and lost propulsion, which forced us to anchor a bit sooner than planned.

The fact it was daylight and the wind never got above 30 knots was our saving grace. That and the fact no one dragged quickly. The lesson though is this is not the place to be in bad weather. It’s a terrible harbour. Nice town, good internet, but a terrible harbour.

A Chubasco on Training Wheels

A classic thunderhead--and right in our way. we detoured around this one.

It's Chubasco season. This means on unpredictable nights, at some point after we're peacefully asleep, we'll suddenly wake to a violent thunder squall. The way to prepare for a Chubasco is to keep the boat ready to head to sea and have an escape route programmed into the GPS, just in case that pleasant anchorage turns into a gnarly lee shore.
We know this. But after a couple of months of peaceful nights, it's easy to get lax. Last night we left the laundry out, the awnings up and the dingy down. It was almost like we were taunting the wind gods.
So they slapped us, gently.
I woke first. At 2am I felt a strong gust-when I popped my head out the hatch I saw a massive lightning squall in the distance. The steps; awnings down, laundry in, dingy up, engine, depth sounder and radar on, were automatic. While we worked, the wind ramped up, the seas built, my hands shook and my mouth went dry.
We've been through squalls like these numerous times. In Florida and on the rest of the East Coast they were simply part of summer, but usually they happened in the afternoon and we saw them coming. Somehow though it wasn't the Florida or even the past Baja storms I thought of, as I watched the squall squat malevolently on the ridge across from us. I thought of the La Cruz storm.
Rather ironically, I've just sold a story about lessons learned from the La Cruz to Cruising World (slated for the safety at sea issue this winter). Even more ironically we ignored the lessons we learned. If the Chubasco had been a fast moving one that came toward us rapidly, while packing the typical 50-60 knot gusts, we would have maybe gotten as far as getting the awnings down. The dingy and laundry would have had to fend for themselves.
Instead the storm was pretty much stationary for two and a half hours. It sat several miles away and gave us plenty of time to think about our transgressions.
Lightning Grounding:
The one thing that did give me some piece of mind is Evan finished up a long planned lightning grounding system. Our boat contains a lot of carbon fibre; including the chain plates, so giving the lightning an easy way out of the boat is pretty vital. Our solution is relatively low tech: he attached a #1 gauge copper cable to the mast and attached it to a copper pipe which we lower into the water during a lightning storm.
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