News from the Turks and Caicos Island is trickling through. So far we know that they have sustained major damage.  Moments ago the crew of the Royal Cayman Island Police Service, which dispatched the police helicopter to TCI to assist with the recovery efforts,  posted this heartbreaking picture of Providenciales. 🙁   My decision to leave before the hurricane was definitely the right one.

So Irma is passing Cayman – not as far as initially expected though, which to me is a bit of a surprise. Note the satellite picture below and Cayman in red.  As you can see, the system is nearing Florida, but since it is so huge, we are getting the outer bands.  The outer bands do not require any preparation or need to worry for us.

Due to the storm, all airlines need to get their planes out of the way before it hits.  Since Cayman is fairly close to Miami, a few of them based in Florida opted to store their planes at our airport.  Of course, being a small airport, we cant expect American Airlines to place all of their planes here.  But we do have approximately 9 “foreign” aircrafts here, mainly cargo planes.

The apron is quite full of planes! Lots of them from “IBC”, a cargo company.

 

These are also cargo planes.  Odd looking 1950’s Corvair’s 🙂

I made a few video’s of the waves – since this morning the wind has picked up and the wave action is quite intense.  A small craft warning is in effect and the police also advised that no diving/swimming be done this week-end.  Based on what you will see below, seems like a no-brainer to avoid the water.

This first video is from the southern coast.

This one is from George town on the West side.

I had to go to the office this morning for a few hours.  So I got “artsy” and tried out the time lapse function on my phone.  Not a bad result. As you can see, a decent amount of wind and lots of clouds.  Irma is spinning counter clockwise so from west to east. We are looking east here as you will see.  This 22 second video is about 1h in “real time”

So that’s it.  Irma did not affect the Cayman Islands a part from some of the stuff you saw above. At this hour, Irma is approaching Florida, especially its west (Gulf) coast.  Seems like each place Irma has gone, I have friends and some kind of connection. In fact I have a few friends in Florida that are riding it out. Also, seems like Irma will greatly affect the city of Naples.  As a kid, I recall my family going there at Christmas when I was 8-12 years old.  There is a pier there where I would go fishing.  I even went back there a few years ago with Julie. Great memories. I hope it will be still there when the storm is over.