Sunday morning and I am sitting on my bed with the door and windows open, listening to the sounds of heavy rain mixed with joyous and uplifting church music. Our cottage is opposite a Catholic church and on a Sunday I love to listen to the black choir. Why can’t Irish masses be so beautiful!? The rain is pouring down. Heavy and relentless, like tropical rain and I am reminded again that I am on a different continent. In the distance I can just about see the towering mountain peaks through the heavy rain. It suddenly reminds me of Indonesia or of that island they used to film Jurassic Park – all lush and green yet tropical at the same time. I have all the windows open, not just to let the music in, but to let some of the cooler air of the rain in too. It has been so muggy that I developed a headache with all the heavy pressure. Yesterday really was the worst since we got here. Temperatures were probably early 30s but not a flutter of air. You could cut the atmosphere in half it was so heavy. Even the famous seas around this part of the country were as flat as a pancake. All of that was in sharp contrast to the day before.

Friday was our 1 year anniversary of the wedding in Malaysia and we thought we should go out for a nice dinner to celebrate it. We are only a 5 minute walk from the shops and restaurants so decided to walk with Saoirse in her basinette so she could sleep. The winds had been strong all day and I was a little concerned about walking to the restaurant. Then again we needed the exercise and walking meant that we could have wine without worrying about driving. By the time we were finished, the streets were deserted – the winds were howling around us making it hard to even walk forward. JC struggled to push the pram and all around us trees and branches lunged ominously towards us. I began to get very concerned for Saoirse’s safety at that stage as the pram was fairly shallow and all I could think of was her being swept away! Strangely, as scared as I was, she thought it was great fun and giggled and squeeled at every blast of air! We eventually made it back safely but we both swore not to take her out again in such weather.

That night was a long night. The windows and doors rattled constantly and I was bracing myself for the wind to shatter them and spray us all with glass shards! Every now and then we would here things crashing and breaking, police cars wailing past on their way to another blaring alarm. Dogs barking and the trees outside our windows making so much noise that I felt sure one or more would come ploughing through the window onto our bed. Needless to say neither JC nor I got a wink of sleep. Saoirse, however, being a baby, slept like one. Amazing! The next day JC called me from the marina to say that the storm had caused a lot of damage. Our boat was fine. One insulation foam sheet had blown away but someone had kindly fished it out of the sea and left it tied securely to one of the docks. One boat was pushed entirely up onto the docks but was luckily made of steel so didn’t sink. Another catamaran had a 1 meter chunk missing from the back section of its right hull. Part of the marina docks collapsed from the pressure of the boats that tore their lines and a section of it sank. It nearly broke off. 3 or 4 boats would have drifted off into other boats if that had happened.

No one on the marina had gotten any sleep as they were all out securing their own boats or helping others. The wind speed was recorded in the marina at 94 knots (that’s sailor speak for 103 miles per hour), that is a hurricane (gale force 12). Makes you humble when you see first hand the brute power of nature and the elements. I would have hated to have been at sea during that storm!