Sideways RainAhh, a soothing sea breeze, or, as people who live outside the fair city prefer to call it, a howling gale. There's nothing quite like the Wellington Wind. If we lived in more tropical environs, the massive low and associated winds that's been hovering off the East coast of New Zealand for the last few days would be classed as a hurricane, but you don't have hurricanes in temperate zones, you just have bloody big storms. From the NZ Herald...

In Mt Kaukau, near the city, the average wind blast was 133km/h [82 mph] gusting up to 178km/h [110 mph]. The average wind speed in Cook Strait was 130km/h [80 mph] gusting up to 160km/h [99 mph]

So yes, it was fairly blowing. Anyway, my wife gets up at her traditional time of 6am to go for her run, steeled to her morning workout by a work colleague's use of the phrase 'a creampuff' (about another employee, but motivation enough), and heads out into the still dark morning and the howling wind, the sleet mixed with ice cold sea water whipped by the wind off the mountainous swells of Cook Strait.

We live on the leeward side of a hill, with Cook Strait, notorious for it's big swells and cold seas (if do you follow that link, scroll to the bottom of the page), on the other side of the rise. So when my wife headed up the hill this morning, everything was probably all right until she got to the top, 100ft or so above sea level, where the shelter of the hill disappears, and the full force of the gale just about blew her off her feet. She wisely chose to turn heel and continue her jog around the more sheltered inner suburb - only 80km/h winds here - but still (as she described later) with the sensation of frozen needles pinging off her legs at every stride. I was in bed, warm. My 4yo, an earlier riser than me, got the story first, so he ran into the bedroom and gave me a breathless second-hand description of the morning jog: "...and when she got to the top of the hill there was a big WHHHOOOSSSHHHHH! and the wind nearly blew her away!"

Going for an early morning jog in a hurricane. My wife is now, surely, a true Wellingtonian. I am, yet again, in awe of her will-power.

But yes, with our storms here, the Cornwall floods and Hurricane Charley, the weather has been filling the bits of the paper that the Olympics hasn't. I'm trying to find a conspiracy theory to explain it, but nothing springs to mind. Suggestions welcome.

# |

blog main page