New record!

New record: 43 kt

Last Saturday introduced us to the first of our winter storms. It was well and accurately forecast, so everyone on the dock was prepared.

And it was a doozy!  The winds were pretty much continuously over 30 kt - now in a 'normal' storm, a 30 kt gust will really wake you up.  But in this storm, 30 kt pretty much became the background - a canvas on which the bigger gusts were painted.

Whenever there were a flurry of these bigger gusts, I went out into the cockpit to see what the anemometer was showing.  And each time I saw a reading higher than the one I had previously photographed, I took a new photo.  This one shows the biggest gust I saw - 43 kt - a new record high here at the dock!

The force of the wind goes up as the square of its speed.  This means that this gust had nearly 5 times the destructive power of 20 kt wind!  The marina sent out staff to secure the lids of dock boxes, after one blew open, was ripped loose and blew off the dock entirely.  Needless to say, power outages were common all over the Seattle area, but everyone out at the end of G Dock came thru unscathed.  During the worst of it, several of us were out walking the dock, checking lines and looking for unsecured items.

Here comes the next one! (Picture stolen from Cliff Mass' blog)

And now there is another storm forecast for tomorrow.

Welcome to winter!

New record!