Some of us thought the wind of last summer exhausted the supply forever. Certainly the last two weeks have been totally windfree and awesome. Not this weekend. I took the unusual step of cancelling Sunday racing on the Saturday already - the forecast showed high South-Easters for 3 days. Its hard to trust the weather forecast when low-pressure cells are involved, but in this case there was a huge High Pressure just below Africa at 1028 Mb. No mistakes here. Hout Bay suffers the wind especially because of the acceleration near the mountains. At the Post Office a huge Bluegum (Australian Eucalyptis) had collapsed into the parking area. Covered the entire car park. The beach road was covered in sand - in fact I saw one car being towed out in the middle of the "tarred road". The pics below show the surface water being lifted 50m into the air, due to the Katabatic Winds coming down from Chapmanspeak. Sailors call the mouth of the bay "Thunder Alley" because it is really quite scary entering the bay under sail in these conditions. And today it was cold as well.
Takes 40+ knots to lift water off the surface!
White water all over the bay. If you look carefully, the small white streak below Victoria road is the NSRI RIB doing their Sunday morning exercises. It was quite bouncy for them even near the beach. Give that boat a Bells!
