Hurricane Beaches

Living here in El Porvenir, 15 to 20 feet from the ocean (depending on whether it is high tide or low tide), has allowed me to become a bit of a wave watcher. I’ve come to know the many colors that the sea can be, much like an opal or mother-of-pearl. I’ve seen it be sapphire blue, emerald green, slate grey, and chocolate milk brown.

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 1^st-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