We’ve lived aboard The Fox - continuously - for almost four years now. We’re beginning our third winter aboard here in the Pacific Northwest. We both expected that this last winter would be the most difficult, for no reason other than that we will have both stopped the jobs and are impatient to finally (finally!) get traveling long distance, long term, but must wait out the bad weather until it is wise to do so. We did not expect that the Autumn winter in November would be full of rain, sleet, snow and below-freezing temperatures. Criminy - what’s Winter going to be like?! November turned so foul, we both uncharacteristically began to lose the ability to cope, although at first we assumed it was just us. Mind you, we stayed nice and warm in The Fox - but neither of us wanted to leave the boat in such weather:
“Dude. It’s really coming down.”
“That was a pretty heavy gust just now.”
“Man, it’s raining harder.”
“And it’s only 5:30am.”
“I don’t want to go to work. Do Not Want.”
“Sucks to be you - you should be retired, like me.”
“Grrrrrrrrrr…..”
It’s hard, spending 6 months a year inside a rain parka. Especially when sunset happens at 4:30pm.
But then, about halfway through November, it started to get interesting. Seems we were chasing a record for rainfall. A big record. The newspapers started following the rainfall they way they usually follow sports, and I got all caught up in the Great Storm Watch of Aught-Six. I hadn’t been so excited since the Mariners were in the American League playoffs in 1995 and 1996. Would there be enough rain to beat the record? Was it slacking off too much? Was it losing momentum? Oh, the sweet tension of it all.
I am proud to announce to the Internet tubes and all of cyberspace that Seattle, Washington has achieved distinction once again. November, 2006, was the wettest month ever recorded here since the early Cretaceous period - or at least since record keeping began hereabouts, in 1896. By month’s end we’d exceeded 1933’s record* by having collected 15.63 inches of total rainfall; November 25 was the only day during which no precipitation was recorded. The Fox’s barometer dropped as low as 990mB and slammed as high as 1040mB, vigorously bouncing up and down between those two extremes during the whole month. Through it all, The Fox stayed cozy. So remember this, dear readers:
If your problem is a Pacific Northwest winter, a Swedish-built Malo is definitely the solution.
Marianne
*
Certain weather wonks are arguing with some credibility that, due to vagaries in small localized weather patterns, the pre-1948 data collected at a downtown Seattle location cannot be favorably compared with the rainfall collected at the current, post-1948 location. Thus, the wonks argue, Seattle actually has not broken the 1933 record. So, much like baseball’s Major League juicing scandals, the November ‘06 rainfall record might always carry an asterisk. But this is not a weather blog, so with apologies to Lee Chesneau, I don’t care.
After the storm.....
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