Weather

  

  With a major blizzard hitting New England and affecting our friends and family in that area I thought I'd write about weather. I've spent the last three seasons teasing (just a bit) about the weather we experience in Florida while those back home are freezing or buried in snow. You know, complaining about a cold front dropping the temperature from 85 to 75 in the day and 65 to 55 at night. See, we suffer, too.

     This is our third winter down here and each has been different from the others. There are, however, some general patterns. When a winter cold front hits Connecticut it very often trails all the way down the east coast and passes through Florida. When we're in the Keys it's the very bottom tip of the front that reaches us and has very little force. The wind shifts to the north (not the northwest like at home) and brings cooler temps (about 10 degrees lower) for about two days. Then the wind starts to clock around to the SE or SW and it warms up. In central Florida these fronts bring the temps down to the mid-40s at night. Our first season in Ft Pierce saw a week of mid-30s at night. That was no fun.

     People who want to cross the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas wait for a Norther (a cold front) to pass through and wait a little more for the wind to get at least to SE, preferably S or SW, and head across. A wind with any N in it is no fun when it is going against the north flowing Stream. Very No Fun!. Wind is called the direction it is coming from and current is called the direction it is going. A north current and a north wind oppose each other. Also not fun.

     This year was a little unusual because Highs were setting up off the Carolina coasts and staying there. That brings warmer air to New England (a SW breeze) but NE to E wind on our side of the rotation. This makes for rougher sea conditions and more moisture in the air. Not neccessarily rain in those clouds but damper. That's why we would 'complain' about the air feeling cold when the temp dropped to 75. Or 65 at night. Yep, suffering.

     Southern Florida mainly stays warm all winter while central Florida can get fairly cold at times. This year has been warmer than usual. Our first year was cooler that normal and last year was pretty average with stable pattern changes. It made it easy to get to the Bahamas. This year was doable but a little trickier. We were not going anyway.

     We may have problems as we head north. A couple of our passages are north in fairly open water and north winds make them very uncomfortable. The Nuese River, Pamlico Sound and Albermarle Sound can be very nasty in Northers. Of cousre the offshore passages of New Jersey have to wait for southerly breezes, too.

     So it's not all blue skies and warm temperatures for us. Only about three months of the winter.