Living in Grand Cayman

(Note: I made two other recent posts below)

Back to our regular scheduled Cayman hurricane news that so many of you crave! 🙂

The temperatures in Cayman have been super warm. On my last dive, I recorded water temperature of 84, which is desirable in a swimming pool, not the ocean.  The hotter the ocean, the more powerful storms we get.

Out in the Atlantic action is gearing up.  Here is today’s map from the NHC in Miami.  The two systems of note have just left Africa and are making their way west towards the Caribbean and USA.   Still a bit far for a clear forecast.

The one farthest to the right is the most “interesting” for us in Cayman.  The reason : its lower.  Typically, what I have seen in the time have been here is that if it starts out higher (like No. 1 just above it, closer to the Cap Verde Islands – the small dots off the African coast), they tend to curve north to the Bahamas, Bermuda or the US coast.

When they start off lower, then they have a better chance of entering the Caribbean basin and thats no good.  However, as you can see below, its still very far off and the computer models are nowhere near a consensus to its long term tracking.

For those of you who want some more technical information about these systems, Jeff Masters of Wunderground (where I took the above picture) has a great weather blog (he is a meteorologist …) It can be found here.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html

Should be interesting in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

While in Las Vegas last week, I had the opportunity to go for a (quick) road trip to Death Valley, California.  If you like heat, this is the place for you.  Think “opening the oven to look at your pizza” type heat! Its extremely intense.  However, its an easy and very enjoyable drive.  The roads are in great condition and the views are spectacular.

On the road there ; some great mountain views

This is the spot.  It is the lowest place in North America ; 282ft below sea level.  There is a rectangular sign about 1/2 way up that mountain (difficult to see on the picture) where shows the sea level.  Its a looooong way up!

Out for a walk on the salt flats.   The temperature was a crazy 117f  (+-47c) when we did this walk. I have to admit that walk was not one of my brightest ideas.  When we left the car, we had cold drinks in our hands.  I kid you not ; when we walked back about 15 minutes later, they were piss warm, yuk!  Only good thing is that the humidity is so low that you don’t get all sweaty like in Cayman.

My high school friend Mathieu joined me on this road trip.  He is getting married in a few weeks and thought it would be great so spend some time with him so he flew down to join me!  Very wise of her, Julie did not come to Las Vegas with me.  There was not a day below 105 while I was there, so staying inside in the A/C was the way to go.   Note, we are not holding hands in this picture! 🙂

The temperature gauge in the rental car!

On the way back, we saw this fellow on the road.  He seemed lost.  We tried to give him some water but that was a failure. Anyway, coyotes have survived in the desert for thousands of years, so I assume s/he will be OK.

The trip!  We started out in Las Vegas, then took the northern route (top) and then after Death Valley, went south (down) and back to Las Vegas to complete the loop. +-330miles/550km from Las Vegas, to Death Valley and back in one afternoon!  If you plan on doing this trip on your next trek to Las Vegas, get a comfortable rental car, bring lots of drinks and a GPS is quite useful.

A regular reader of my blog, Lisa from California, was kind enough to send me a picture she took while vacationing recently on Grand Cayman.  An I must say, what a picture it is!  WOW

The picture was taken from Seven Mile beach on August 5th, just after lunch time.

Now these things are definitely not rare ; I have seen a few myself.  However, this one seems much larger that the ones I have seen.  I am guessing this is a mile or so off shore, so its a big one.

I had to do some reading about these things ; actually an interesting phenomenon. They are generally much weaker than land based tornadoes and do not suck up any water.   Here is the Wiki for those interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterspout

There are also a few video’s of this on Youtube.  Impressive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUkpVi9yRGs

More posts in the next few days …