Where did the Hurricane Thomas go??

Friday morning we woke up to discover that the anchorage at St. George suddenly had emptied as by magic. Just the night before you could count around 25 boats and the day after 3............ We got word that some bad weather was heading this way. Earlier in the morning the tropical storm Tomas had been born (who later on developed into a hurricane), and it was predicted to hit here around midnight, and accordingly the whole island started closing down early afternoon. By late afternoon everybody except us had left the anchorage, as we went by the assumption that it would take more than a tropical storm to shake the tug apart. Despite the weather gurus forecast the storm did not arrive at midnight.

Saturday morning, even though the forecasts were now predicting landfall further north in the Caribbean, the town was still bringing out the sandbags and nailing up the storm shutters. After the devastation of the Island by Hurricane Ivan in 2004 the nerves were running high here.

And Saturday afternoon the weather came! Or more correctly it didn’t! Sure, St. Vincent got smashed. Here, well it went all grey, and there were several showers during the day, but where was the wind? All weather reports had predicted 40+ knots, gusting to 60, but reality was that we had no wind AT ALL! The same pattern repeated itself during the night. Once again the weather gurus convinced us of winds of 20 - 40 knots and again they were wrong. Instead we had a strange calm night if you count out the big waves that was rocking the boat hard from side to side.
It is a weird feeling, to be so close to a such a weather monster, who a short distance away is tearing another country apart, while we go unharmed by. I have to say it was bit of an anti-climax, here we were all prepared for mother nature and then nothing.....NOTHING! In fact the wind was dead flat, even more than on a normal day here.

I have to admit that I was sort of looking forward, upon returning home, to tell my nieces and nephew how I tackled and survived the Hurricane Thomas......oh well, perhaps it was for the better that Thomas never came knocking on our door.