Watching
Hurricane Ernesto pass just off the coast was interesting to me after growing
up near the Texas Gulf Coast but hardly right on it as I am here on the Caribbean.
I was able to watch the changes of the beaches here just outside the house
between my first visit at the end of June and now. It was a full moon in early August, not long
before the storm, so tides were higher than normal, and each day it seemed that
the beach was melting away bit by bit. During and right after the storm, there
was no beach, and 2 feet less of land than had been there the month before, but
one could tell that the beach was suspended in the water, which looked like
frothy chocolate milk. It wasn’t until a few days later that the sand had
settled out of the water and back into a beach, only now with a new
sandbar/tide pool/lagoon about twenty feet closer than it had been previously!
I took a
series of photos over my time here, all from pretty much the same place on the
shore. While not the most exacting of scientific processes, it has brought home
to me the sense of the sea as a force to which one must adapt rather than
attempt to control.
The photos
are below, but I also created a pdf that lets you see them side-by-side.
LOOKING
EAST:
1. July 1st-ish
2. As
Ernesto stormed toward us
3. About
halfway through Ernesto’s off-coast travels
4. A week
after the storm
LOOKING WEST
1. Around
the first of July
2. As
Ernesto came toward us
3. After the
first section of Ernesto has passed by us
4. A week
after the storm
Posts
