Tag: wind

Blow job

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Sorry about that title…

Busy, busy here ahead of a summer weekend, but it’s (literally) blowing a gale in Cape Town today.

Watch it love – someone’s going to have that handbag. This is South Africa.

Here are some more pics. Gusts of 164kph (102mph) were recorded at the Upper Cableway Station and that cruise ship that was meant to leave on Wednesday evening hasn’t gone anywhere.

The winds are due to subside over the next few days, but in the meantime, take care out there peeps.

UPDATE: And now. The video!

After the calm…

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It’s been enlightening and slightly amusing reading and hearing news from Cape Town today. We’re not that far away – a couple of hundred kilometres tops – and yet they seem to have been struggling with grey, wet weather there. We’ve been living it up with blue skies for most of the day, albeit with a rather dramatic (read severe gale, gusting storm force) northwester in attendance as well.

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I digitally sucked all the colour out of that so as not to upset the folks back home too much. But the sea has been wild today. I did get some pics on the “big” camera, but I don’t have the means to easily upload them here, so that’ll have to wait till we return home tomorrow.
I’m not sure how good they will be anyway, as I was constantly fighting to keep the sea spray off the lens. And constantly losing too.

Seaside Slideshow

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I was going to call this “Gorgeous Green Point”, “Marvelous Mouille Point”, “Thrilling Three Anchor Bay” or “Spectacular Sea Point”.
But that’s just because the boundary lines between those suburbs have always seemed a little vague and disputable to me. As it was, these were taken from the Mouille Point lighthouse (in Green Point) on what was a stunningly beautiful, but dangerously windy Sunday afternoon. I had to hold onto Scoop to stop her being blown into the South Atlantic.
Again.

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More pics here.

The swell wasn’t huge, but the wind was whipping the tops off the waves in the bright sunshine. I haven’t seen wind this strong since the last time the wind was this strong and I can’t remember when that was.

Brolly issue

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Amazing. Here I am wondering what to blog about today and then it drops into my lap onto my screen, courtesy of News24 commenter Krolie, who took full advantage of an article on the wintery weather (which missed Cape Town almost completely) to vent his or her spleen over a long-standing issue which has clearly caused a lot of pent up frustration:

For the past 20 years I each year bought an umbrella in the hope that THIS time it will do what it is supposed to, but alas, if you exit the door and there is something just stronger than a breeze, your umbrella takes another shape whipping the other way round and well, your next best hope is for a bit of water to use this useless object as a boat of sorts.
Anybody else find an umbrella pretty useless in the WC in the middle of winter? CT is well known for people hugging lampposts, even grabbing towards the closest human zipping past you as if hell bent to win a marthon.
Yip, even your rainjacket ends up not being so protective as it is renowned to do – whipping up and down and all over the place, including the clothes you’re wearing underneath. You might as well put your clothes in a packet, tie it to your body and streak down Adderley Steet, because wet you will be to the skin, no matter what you do. At least you’t hopefully have some dry clothes at the end of your “flight”.

Just wondering what the use is of a umbrella/brolly really is in this kind of weather…

Is Krolie mad? Einstein thinks so:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

When May comes around, and Krolie heads for the local umbrella shop, is there not some small hint, some glimmer of a memory that when s/he is doing is utterly pointless and has been proven so on many separate occasions over the previous two decades?

I have to say too, that it appears some degree of artistic licence has been employed here. I have never hugged a lamppost in Cape Town – there are always too many posters on them for one’s arms to get a firm grip – nor have I ever grabbed the closest human to me. The latter is an extremely dangerous means of protecting one’s self from the rain anyway. South Africans know how to fight off muggers and you’re more than likely to find yourself lying in a pool of blood, not water, with your brolly stuck somewhere where the sun don’t shine (that’s PE this week).

So people, do not buy an umbrella in the misguided hope it will keep you dry in Cape Town’s wind. And do not streak down Adderley Street. It’s not clever, and in these sort of meteorological conditions, it certainly won’t be big either.

Exactly wet

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Look, it has been raining a fair amount in Cape Town over the last few days. This is to be expected. Cape Town’s 3½ annual months of winter have begun and September and the spring that it allegedly brings with it seems a long way away right now.  
Kirstenbosch had over 50mm of rain yesterday and they’ve added to that with some frighteningly heavy stuff overnight.

So what will the rest of the week bring?
Step forward the South African Weather Service website:

Not great, hey?
But then check out that rain for tomorrow. A 30% chance of 6.8mm. 6.8. Six. Point. Eight.
Not six point five. Nor seven point zero.
Nope: to go with Steers’ infamous Wacky Wednesday – the day each week upon which one is able to purchase twice as many of last week’s least popular burger than one could have done last week for the same money as one would have spent on said burger the previous week if one actually had any inclination to buy it – SAWS have made tomorrow Super Accurate Tuesday.

I’ve done some rudimentary calculations and I reckon that to increase the height of the rainwater column collected in a standard pluviometer (which would have an 8″ or 20.32cm funnel arrangement), you would need around 67 large (3.6–5.1 mm) raindrops.
Now that might seem a lot, but when you think about how many raindrops fall in the average heavy shower (we’re talking literally hundreds of millions), it’s really not.

This suggests to me that either SAWS have invested heavily in highly accurate and expensive rain-measuring equipment (when really the money would have been better spent on a decent website) or, more likely, that they are just messing us around and we can actually expect a whole 7mm of rain tomorrow.

Meanwhile, in other weather news on the SAWS site, be on the lookout for NW winds gusting to 51.358kmh which may result in waves with heights in excess of 7.046m between Cape Columbine and a specific rock 1.967481km west of Plettenberg Bay.