Awoke this morning to more strong winds, following an overnight lull. Yesterday's gale caused some damage in the island, which (amongst other things) resulted in a loss of electricity and telephone services to Ness, in the north of the island. These have all been restored now. Fortunately our ferry sailed, so the shops should be restocked later this afternoon. Over the past few days, a number of fishing boats from Sligo in Ireland have sheltered in Stornoway Harbour. The last one sailed about an hour ago, but blimey, wasn't she thrown about at the harbour bar. Everybody went down to have a look, but she managed to round the beacon without mishap, and is presently heading down the Minch, bound for Ireland (I presume). On the way to the Coastguard Station I had to dodge all the bins that were being blown about - it's binday in town. It is actually quite a nice morning, good sunny breaks, in spite of the near galeforce winds. The next line of showers is already on its way in, judging by the satellite and rainfall radar images on the Met Office website. However, that should be the last of this week's gales, and tomorrow (Saturday) is expected to be a nice, sunny, windless day. We'll have to make the most of it, because the Atlantic has decided to throw a few more low pressure systems at us. In my opinion, one of the storms we had this week had the remnants of Tropical Depression Zeta in it.
This was the last tropical storm of the 2005 hurricane season, and is shown on the above satellite picture from last week. It disintegrated and was absorbed into an Atlantic low pressure system last weekend. Zeta is the 6th letter of the Greek alphabet. The Atlantic spawned 27 named storms last year, and there were only 21 names allocated. Once those ran out, the storm chasers had to resort to the Greek alphabet. It is anticipated that the coming decade is going to be as bad as last year was. ]]>
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