Please check out the greatly improved website of the Florida Sea Base Ship’s Store at www.fsbshipstore.com. Carrie Kane has done an outstanding job of improving the site. There is also a link to the Ship’s Store on the LINKS page of this site. The Ship’s Store is having a spring sale so hurry; I’m sure you don’t want to miss out. One of the clearance items is the “Sails Call” t-shirt (now only $10.00). I took the photo that’s on the t-shirt (unfortunately I do NOT get a commission).
Cyclone Yasi slammed into Queensland, Australia yesterday. Winds of 155 mph and storm surge as high as 16′ were recorded according to Dr. Jeff Masters of Weather Underground. Dr. Masters received the following in an email from Blair Trewin of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, ”Yasi is almost certainly the most intense landfall in Queensland since at least 1918, and possibly since 1899. In 1918 there were two cyclones (at Mackay and Innisfail) with measured pressures in the upper 920s/low 930s but it is quite plausible that the minimum central pressures were lower than that. The 1899 (Mahina/Bathurst Bay) cyclone had a measured pressure (ship near shore) of 914 mb.” However, the number of major tropical cyclones along the Queensland coast has declined since the 1870s, according to recent paper by Callaghan and Power (2010). They found that ”the number of severe TCs making land-fall over eastern Australia declined from about 0.45 TCs/year in the early 1870s to about 0.17 TCs/year in recent times—a 62% decline. This decline can be partially explained by a weakening of the Walker Circulation, and a natural shift towards a more El Niño-dominated era. The extent to which global warming might be also be partially responsible for the decline in land-falls—if it is at all—is unknown.” The full article is available at http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html.
Last night I was afforded the opportunity to welcome the BSA Health and Safety Committee to the Florida Sea Base. The Committee Chair is Bill Hurst and Richard Bourlon from the committee liaison for BSA National Office. The Health and Safety Committee is probably the most influential governing body within the BSA. Is was honored to be an invited guest to two of the 2009 H&S committee meetings. It was good to see so many familiar faces at last nights orientation.
Houston was forecasted to have snow this morning but is having “light freezing drizzle”. Dallas on the other hand is experiencing more snow. If it snows or if we have light freezing drizzle here I am backing up and moving closer to the equator. The weather was very nice here yesterday; high in the upper 70s, mostly sunny and mild wind. As I mentioned Wednesday, our weekend weather will deteriorate a bit. But we will still be a blizzard and hurricane free zone.
Capt. Steve
Aboard S/V Escape