This Season Brings The Summer Wind

 

North Beach sunrise, Tybee Island, Georgia

With a cool, damp, and sometimes stormy weekend behind us, folks in the Southeast are watching a perfect prelude to hurricane season unfold offshore. For a few days a storm off Cape Hatteras churned winds and waves into the Mid-Atlantic shoreline as far north as New Jersey. Overnight that storm began moving south along a decaying front. That movement brought us beautiful weather and light easterly winds to north Georgia today. By the weekend the storm should be somewhere off southeast Florida and weakening . . . or not. We are after all on the threshold of the trade winds and a new hurricane season.

In coastal Georgia, the trades usually creep in softly around the middle of May. They bring in the high cirrus and horsetails as well as the puffy fair-weather cumulus clouds that race over the beach. The clouds sweep inland twenty miles or so where they meet the uplifts of daily heating enhanced by the incentives of an onshore flow. Often, the result is a brisk and exciting line of thunderstorms sometimes extending from the city-state of Charleston to the Players Club fairways at Ponte Vedra Beach. In Savannah, the 3:00 pm showers are so predictable you can almost set a watch by them. When residents advised me an umbrella was a summer essential they weren't fooling. The city's collapsing thunderstorms produced some of the heaviest perpendicular rainfall I've witnessed.

For eleven years I worked at the mouth of the Savannah River and watched the light show ten miles west over Savannah arcing north and east toward Hilton Head Island. Occasionally land breezes swept in early and pushed the storms over me. Such a magnificent show. After a brief evening calm the steady land breeze resumed only to be replaced in the early morning hours with a quiet wind off the water. That wind embraced the island in salt-saturated humidity and a haze that turned golden with a full sunrise. The Boat-tailed Grackles skirmishing in the oleanders nearby served as a natural alarm clock during the ten years we lived on Tybee Island. I do miss the birds, but not their alarm clock role.

The trade wind days last into September to be replaced by weeks of spectacular warm, dry, cloudless days, cool nights and warm water lingering into November. Of course, the occasional tropical storm can interrupt the coastal idyll that is the norm on the sea islands. It is to be expected and respected by those who share the fragile boundary of life at the ocean's edge. In Atlanta we'll sometimes enjoy the remnant sea breezes that survive the 200 mile journey from the Atlantic. It is a welcome reminder of the joy of coastal living.