Storm!

      Or, You can't see over the horizon ...

Seven weeks ago last Sunday (mid-September), we had a heck of a storm here. I was up at Boca Ciega Yacht Club (BCYC) sitting on the patio, watching sailing students out on the little 16.5’ Catalinas, their first time on the water. Their instructors were teaching them to do the most basic things – notice where the wind was coming from, steering with a tiller, and tacking.

Now, BCYC is careful about the weather when we have sail school. The Catalinas are far more stable than most instructional boats because they have full-sized fin keels. However, they can’t be reefed, and are easily overpowered by what would be moderate wind on a larger boat (we send students in when we see sustained wind of 15 mph or more, and actively encourage members to not take the boats out on windy days as well).

But this was a beautiful mid-September afternoon, and “storm season” (not hurricane season) was just about over. Except … September was exceptionally warm this year, more like August.

The prediction for that Sunday was a 30% chance of rain. There was no prediction for particularly bad weather. But it’s Florida, and when it’s 90º on the coast, it is often 95º inland. Very often we get a sea breeze that forms in the afternoon from the west, which hits the stronger prevailing east wind coming off the Atlantic and across that hot interior. Thunderstorms can be the result. Two walls of wind colliding with lots of heat and humidity often means thunderstorms. However, they typically form at least a little inland from the coast, especially by September.

This day was going to be different.

There were probably 15 people on the patio. The “Waterfront Director” is the person who makes the final decision about whether or not students should be called in due to weather, but none of us saw any signs of trouble … except for one man. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera with me that day, but we had a similar weather pattern the next day, so I took my camera up to BCYC the next day like a storm chaser, hoping to get lucky – and I did.

This first picture is very like what we saw that Sunday, a little before 4PM: clouds, but relatively formless, and not threatening-looking at all. They kind of looked like cotton candy.

Innocent-looking "cotton candy" clouds. Only one person realized they
were actually "blow off" from a huge storm just out of sight over the horizon.

Only one person on the patio looked at the clouds suspiciously. He went to the club’s computer and checked the weather radar. The radar (which you can get on your cell phone if you’re close to the coast) showed a massive gathering of angry-looking red and orange. I couldn't take a picture of the radar on Sunday, but I saw it, and it was huge, moving west and bearing down on both Pinellas and Manatee County – and just over the horizon -- out of view on land. The clouds we could see from the patio were pretty. The radar, however, was scary.

He and the Waterfront Director talked, and they quickly called the student boats in. We got all the students in ten minutes before a wall of wind of at least 40 mph hit us. We would have had five student boats out in a terrible storm if one person hadn’t realized that those sweet fluffy clouds we were looking at weren’t sweet at all – they were an alarm warning.

Here are photographs I took of the next day's storm. First I’ll show you what was happening on the radar. Each picture was taken less than five minutes apart, so on Monday, as on the previous Sunday, we had a rapidly building storm. It didn’t cover as much geography as the one the day before had – but it could have.

Rapidly after seeing the first innocent-looking “cotton candy” clouds, we saw something like this:

Still not terribly threatening looking, but it rapidly (and I mean, within minutes) developed into something like this (actually, all of these pictures would have been more ominous on Sunday):

And then this:

See how the “cotton candy” clouds are still there in the background? But they’re higher now. You don’t have to be a meteorologist to see that you’re looking at turbulent air. Turbulent air and sailboats? Not the best combination!

The storm was rapidly building. Within two minutes, the sky looked like this:

Those are clouds to pay attention, to, aren’t they? They’re well organized, and growing both vertically and horizontally. At this point, you would be checking weather radar if you had it available to you. Here’s what you need to know about weather radar: the images you see may be 15 minutes old, and when faced with a rapidly growing and intensifying storm, data that is 15 minutes old may be misleading. It may not yet be showing you that rapid intensification. Your eyes and your senses may be much more valuable at this time. By now, you should be preparing for a possible storm, because that storm may move toward you, and even if it doesn't do that directly, it may expand to the point that it envelops you.

Actually, we should have been on high alert from the first glimpse of the “cotton candy” clouds. Why? Because they represented a CHANGE in the weather. Along with an unexpected change in wind direction, temperature or force, an unexpected change in the clouds should get – and keep – your attention.

Within a few minutes the storm was nearly on top of us, and the sky looked more like this. Monday, however, BCYC was on the edge of the storm. Sunday we were in the thick of it, and there were no patches of blue sky showing. The wind was starting to pick up significantly.

From the radar on Monday, it was clear that the bulk of the storm today was going to hit south, in Manatee County, so I went south and crossed the Skyway Bridge. Approaching the Skyway Bridge, this is what I saw:

The wind was gusty, although not as bad as it had been the day before. This storm was smaller and not as bad as the one on Sunday, but you wouldn’t want to be out unprepared in this one, either.

Something should jump out at you at this point: there are no waves. You must be thinking, “What is she talking about? That’s just rain. You’ll get wet, but it’s not a crisis.” You’ve probably seen descriptions of how to judge the strength of the wind by looking at the surface of the water. For instance, at around 12 mph, white caps start to form. By the time the wind is up to 15ph, you’ll see a lot of whitecaps.

Except.

It takes a while for the waves to form. When a storm is rapidly forming, the wave development will lag behind the wind. This storm, as well as the one the day before, grew rapidly, and the wind on Monday, which I estimated to have 30 – 35 mph winds, was plenty strong enough to concern any newer sailor, even though it wasn't as bad as the day before. Monday's storm also didn't last nearly as long as Sunday's did.

Another thing you may have been told is that these storms pop up in Florida but don’t stick around very long. That can be true (see my story, “Oh Dorothy!” for an example of strong but short-lived storms).

However, the Sunday storm was different. It kept growing, and reforming, and re-strengthening, and here’s an example. Two members of BCYC, well-experienced sailors, and another couple who were just along for the ride, were about four miles out on the Gulf of Mexico when the Sunday storm hit the coast. They were trying to return to Gulfport, but their boat’s engine could make no headway against the storm, and they had their hands full managing the boat. Their friends could not be much help.

At 11PM they were still caught in the storm. They were exhausted, and wet, and hungry, and they threw in the towel and called for a tow. The towboat was able to fight the waves and the wind and get them safely home. It is not typical for afternoon storms to last that long – or, for that matter, to develop with so little warning. But it does happen.

So what are you to do?

What you should NOT do is print out this article and look for these kinds of clouds. You won’t always see “cotton candy” clouds before a storm. What you should watch for is changes in the weather that might be an early warning system. In addition, you should tune your radio to the weather channel. A weather advisory was put out very early for the Sunday storm, and there’s a lot you can do to prepare for a storm, even when you only have a few minutes. See the accompanying article, “Ten Minutes to Act,” for things you might get done if you have ten minutes warning before a storm hits. 

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