Aeolus Lets Loose

It’s been quite windy for several days, ferries and planes cancelled or postponed. But yesterday was a cracker. Even got an alert on my phone. It was well forecast, and I’d been watching Windy.to see what was what.  A deep low was forecast to sweep down from the North West and pass just south of Stewart Island. Isobars nice and close together.  And sometimes that looks exciting, but actually becomes a bit of a fizzer.  Not this time, early to mid morning we were in bright sunshine, and quite calm, but what looked like a circle of clouds around the horizon. Classic eye of the storm stuff.  The glass was falling like a brick, and late mid morning the wind arrived, and by 1200 we were getting really battered.  We are quite sheltered at Sails Ashore, but still hit well over 55 kts on our anemometer. And glass bottomed out at 959.7 mb. I can’t ever remember seeing it quite that low.  The wind peak lasted only around 15 minutes.  with driving rain. Demolished a Lancewood to Iris’ dismay. But really we got off quite lightly. 

Many years ago I had to go across to Ulva to bring back walkers stranded, as their water taxis decided discretion was the better part of valour. It’s a little over a mile from wharf to wharf, and normally we would have motored across in calm weather, maybe 13 minutes.  40 kts westerly, under engine, maybe add 4 minutes.  That day it took just over 40 minutes, and my anemometer was hard on the stops at 99 kts, so probably hitting 150 kts in the gusts. We don’t get all that much of that sort of extreme wind. but it’s far from unknown