Written by Jon:

Hurricane season in this part of the world is officially from June to November, but not all months are created equal with the chance of hurricanes forming in June or November being very small indeed. In fact, mostly you need to sweat in August and September. The graph below shows the frequency of hurricanes by month and you can clearly see that June is very unlikely.

NB: this is number of storms over 100 years, not each year!

However, that doesn’t stop it happening occasionally. Which brings us to the current weather forecast and the nervous chatter on the beach which followed it. So what is going on? And how worried should we be?

There will be many of these ‘potential somethings’ over the coming months and the vast majority won’t be anything of concern for us. This is just the first so we wanted to put a little explanation together and share it with you.

About 2000 miles east of the south Caribbean there are some clouds which look ‘funny’ in a bad way. They aren’t a storm, they aren’t even a depression really, they just look like they could turn into something in the next few days. What could they turn into? A tropical storm? A hurricane? Nothing? All of the above are possible. At the moment NOAA are giving these clouds a 50% chance of turning into ‘something’ at some point in the next 2 days.

Doesn’t look like anything yet!

These clouds are currently moving at about 20 mph and they are about 2000 miles away, or 100 hours (meaning at that rate they will arrive in 3 days, or Monday night here). At the moment GFS (one of the forecasts) is saying 45+ mph of wind on Monday night all the way down in Trinidad. The same forecast for Bequia, our current location, is 25 mph or as we refer to it on Itchy Foot ‘too windy to hang up washing’ and nothing to worry about at all. So there is a lot of complacency here too. But it is simply too early to say, so everyone is sitting and waiting to see what happens in the next 24/48 hours.

If something does form, where will it go? Again, too early to say as they don’t know what ‘it’ is yet. However, the only ‘path’ which has been discussed by forecasters is well south of us down by Trinidad, even lower than Grenada.

In the event that something concerning does form in the next couple of days we have options. Eight hours south is the security of Grenada’s well protected bays and anchorages. Or, 8 hours north is St Lucia and Marigot Bay / Rodney Bay, which are not only well protected but come with a luxury hotel and swimming pool!

In all likelihood this will blow over and not come anywhere near us at all. But rather than let you hear ‘weather warnings’ on the news and fear the worst we felt it was best to write a little pre-emptive blog post. Please, do not worry, there is nothing to worry about currently.