Hurricane Omar

October started out as a fine month beautiful balmy weather
lots of rain greening up the island and flowers popping out everywhere. We had started letting our guard down thinking we had made it through the worst month with no hurricanes and nothing really out there looking threatening.
Little did we know that Omar had some winds in store for us.

Omar started to build in the Caribbean instead of the Atlantic the second week of October. He slowly started sucking in all the moisture he could accumulate from the warm seas, and warm they were the water temperature had been hovering between 82 and 84 degrees for quite some time and Omar decided to grow over the shallower waters.

We watched Omar build, listening to the weather reports, checking the satellite photos, tracking him on our own. When he reached hurricane strength and looked like he was making a bee line for St. Croix we started getting ready.
Even though the weather reports made him appear to be a low grade hurricane we knew he could build over the warm shallow waters so we prepared for the worst.

All day Wednesday we prepped, putting up storm shutters hauling in potted plants, patio furniture and pool toys. We secured everything we thought could become a dangerous projectile hauling away things we had been procrastinating over but now needed to be gotten rid of. The trees well we would have liked to have already trimmed them but we hadn't....again that complacency had set in when no storms had even come near us by October. By the end of the day we were beat and settled in to wait for Omar in our storm protected home.
The power went out around 8:30 and rather than start up the generator we decided to go to bed. The wind had kicked up and it had been raining all day but we had been so busy all day all we wanted was to get a little rest. Luckily we did get a little. At 11:00pm everyone woke up to howling winds. I lay there for a while thinking this is no Category 1 storm these winds have got to be over 100mph and if this keeps up we are in big trouble. We got up and found the hand crank radio and turned it on. Sure enough the 11:00pm NOAA report had Omar a Category 3 and passing by right then to our east. It was moving fast but howling especially up here on top of the hill. We went back to bed and listened in the dark to the clanging and clattering hoping the roof would hold through yet another hurricane. Fortunately for the whole island Omar was a quickie. The worst of it was over by 12:30am and by 2:00am we had fallen back to sleep.
This was our first view, one of us had already been out collecting the avocados that had been stripped from the tree, while the rest of us slept.
The following pics detail how incredibly lucky we were.



After two days of intense clean up we were treated to a beautiful rainbow and sunset. Visitors who had planned their trips 6 months before had no idea what they were walking in to.But as you can see one found that even without power this is still a great place to take a vacation. We are still cleaning up and we don't know when we will get power. i called today and we still aren't on the list. Thank goodness for generators and fast moving storms that trim our trees but don't devastate the whole place.