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You know things are getting back to normal here in the Mullins area when there was a big magazine photo shoot going on the beach this morning. The model must be somebody special since they are paying US $12K a night to stay at The Great House. We are still having some swells but not as big and as frequent as yesterday. High tide is around 5:00 pm so we should get a better idea of how we stand at that time, but the Met office is saying the unusual sea conditions should last through the holiday weekend.
The beach bar is going to have a huge repair bill mainly to the decking area. The beach itself will come back pretty soon but the concern is for the exposed roots of many coconut and other trees in the area. This blogger has not seen such heavy surf on Mullins Beach proper since he was a kid in the '70s. Locals knew they were in for a show of the power of the ocean when they saw waves breaking on the shoal to the north of beach bar (locally called "Chicken"); and it did not disappoint.
This may be of interest to the blogger and other readers--
ReplyDelete(UPI article)Unusually large waves churned by an Atlantic storm system have littered the beaches of Barbados with broken coral in what could be a sign of damage to reefs across the region, a scientist said Sunday.
The amount of rubble on the island's west coast suggests the coral took a heavy pounding, said Leo Brewster, director of Barbados' Coastal Zone Management Unit, who was organizing dives later this week to survey the damage.
"We think it's going to be pretty extensive," Brewster said. "I think we're going to see it across the Caribbean."
The waves, reaching as high as an estimated 30 feet, lashed coastlines from Guyana to the Dominican Republic last week as a large low-pressure system idled off the northeastern United States.
At their peak on Thursday morning, a buoy north of the U.S. Virgin Islands recorded swells of 15 feet — the highest since 1991, said Shawn Rossi, a meteorologist with the U.S. National Weather Service in San Juan. Several countries reported flooding in coastal areas.
In Barbados, the white coral washed up in chunks as heavy as seven pounds, generally healthy but with their polyps rubbed away by the rough surf, Brewster said.
Reef-building coral provide a habitat for thousands of marine creatures but have been dying off across the Caribbean due to coastal pollution, overfishing and disease blamed on rising sea temperatures.