My typical morning ritual is to scan the weather sites while drinking my coffee, then take Chilly for a walk on the beach. It has been pretty windy for the last 4 or 5 days. It's fall, that's how it goes. So, I wasn't at all surprised to find huge surf and strong Northerly winds buffeting the beach.

I wasn't looking forward to heading out on the bay. But there are oysters to drag and I knew it would be windy all week. Plus the forecast suggested that there would be a slight lull as things switched to the East late this morning. Not great, but doable.

But just as I made the turn into the town landing the wind switched almost instantaneousnessly from the East and a gust of at least 40 knots shot across the bay. In a matter of seconds the bay turned white and boats and floats started bouncing. I ran into John E who was checking in on his boat. We watched as each of our boats started taking a pounding on their mooring lines. But they seemed to be holding up to it.

I left to get a better vantage point of my work float further out in the bay. When I returned a tender was up on the rocks and there was a scramble of activity as everyone attempted to get boats away from the trashing floats. As D. Merry and the Harbormasters bolted out through the moorings we watched from the pier. A few times it looked like even there powerful boats weren't going to make it. But they did, and they sped off to the safety of the Bluefish River.

Fortunately I had my camera in my truck. Unfortunately I only had about 1 minute of battery life. Rats. This doesn't completely capture the scene there....unless you know what this dock usually looks like.


This is the wind graph from the weather station right at the Maritime School. You can see the huge jump in wind speed. It jumped up so much I can't even zoom the graph out far enough to catch the peak of the spikes or see the direction data. I hope that last spike at 11am doesn't mean that the weather station blew off the roof.


Someone is going to be unhappy when they find their tender later on. It was to rough and too full of water to even attempt rescuing it.