On The Cusp Of Summer

I thrive in the heat and sweat of a subtropical summer in what the magazine, Southern Living, calls the Lower South. And although not tropical by nature there's something very comforting about the formation of the season's first  coastal storm especially so close to the Georgia Bight. There is no wish for the winds, torrential rains, or high flood tides to bring trouble. Rather, it is the realization that the climate cycles have reconfirmed what we can expect from the trade winds that brought many of our ancestors to the New World. We call it the hurricane season and it begins on June 1. In fact, the first such storm in 1495 left Christopher Columbus and his crew begging for salvation and motivating their captain to venture in such storms only "in the very service of God."

In Georgia, the trades usually creep in softly around the middle of May. They appeared briefly then disappeared with the passage of what's likely to be the last cool frontal boundary we'll see until October. At this hour our coastal storm drifts slowly north toward the Carolina coast from its position about 300 miles east of Atlanta. The storm's blustery east winds freshened a stunningly beautiful day of crystal blue sky, low humidly, and warm temperatures. 

When the trades return to the Georgia coast, they will bring in the puffy and low fair-weather cumulus clouds that race over the beach. Occasionally the high cirrus and horsetails will precede them signaling waves of unsettled weather that may develop into hurricanes. Thankfully those friendly cumulus clouds simply sweep inland twenty miles or so where they meet hot air rising off the Georgia landscape. This cloud wall in the sky often transforms into 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 you can almost set your watch by the showers that drench the Forest City at 3:00 on summer afternoons.

Tybee Island, Georgia

For years I watched from my home and work on the coast as this light show over Savannah arced north and east toward Hilton Head. Sometimes when the land breezes swept in early in the day the storms moved over us. Such a magnificent show. Most storms over Tybee Island ended by midnight. In the early morning hours a quiet southeasterly breeze resumed and embraced the island in salt-saturated humidity only to be replaced by a slight land breeze that persisted until sunrise. If you slept on a porch or without air conditioning, Boat-tailed Grackles scrambling in the island's oleader bushes often made greeting the sunrise a certainty. I only objected on the weekends.

On the Georgia Sea Islands, it seems the trade wind days never want to end. Instead they dwindle ever so slowly into weeks of spectacular warm, dry, cloudless days, cool nights and warm water lasting 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.

High tide in salt marsh from US80 on the way to Tybee

Sources


Photos and Illustrations:
island photo, tybeebb.com
salt marsh, Fort Pulaski National Monument Handbook, 1954.