Stash and Lash and Weather Windows

Posted on by under living aboard, Weather

Stash and Lash. That’s the key to a happy me. After we’ve been sitting tied to a dock for any length of time, we tend to have things sitting all over the place and it takes me anywhere from a few hours to a couple days to get everything put away where I’d like it to be. We also have the typical list of pre-passage activities to do–just in case we decide to go somewhere a bit far away.  We’ve been in one place for too long. We have far too many things sitting out and about just waiting to be flung across the cabin in a seaway. Most things aboard Mahdee do have a place–the old adage of a place for everything and everything in its place works well. We also have piles of periodicals and just “stuff” sitting around and about. Those things are the problems. No place for sundry “stuff” because, well, the particular “stuff” doesn’t really belong on the boat.

Usually we have one large rubbermaid bin filled with the stuff that I just don’t know what to do about. I can tell, when we get underway this time, we’ll have two or three rubbermaid bins of questionable things. I suppose that’s OK for now.

Since we’re getting underway and we’re not quite sure where we’re going, I’ve been keeping an eye on the weather. It’s really too bad that we’re committed to a few things here in the Bay area during the next few weeks. The weather is showing a very nice window of calm waters and literally no winds along the California and Oregon coastline from Point Conception all the way up to the Columbia River. Really amazingly nice weather for going North right now. Too bad we don’t really want to go North right now.

Pots and Pans

Posted on by under Musings

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride
If turnips were swords, I’d wear one by my side
If ifs and ands were pots and pans,
there’d be no need for tinkers’ hands”
–Scottish Proverb

The Heat is On: Year in Review

Posted on by under Weather

We were thinking that the last couple of months have been colder than last year.  Fortunately, we have our wonderful Shipmate stove burning offcuts from our 2007/8 planking project.  But is it really colder?  I decided to find out.  Here is the daily data from the SQL airport which is about 1 mile away.

I have plotted the daily mean temperature reported at SQL and shaded the area between the two lines red if 2012 was warmer or blue if 2012 was colder than 2011.  As we can see from the large patches of red, this past Summer was indeed warmer than the previous year.  We knew it felt warm, but since we hadn’t been around during the Summer of 2011, we couldn’t compare.  Starting in November, however, this year has been much colder as can be seen by the blue shading.  But what about daily high temperatures.?

This plot shows the difference in the daily high temperatures.  The yellow-reds are where 2012 was warmer and the blue-greens are where 2012 was colder.  The line plot has the monthly high temperatures.  As we can see, the data looks pretty balanced between higher and lower.  So what about the temperature lows?

In this plot, we can see that the summer temperature lows were warmer than in 2011.  The monthly lows during the summer were a little warmer, but over the past two months, the monthly low hasn’t been much different from 2011.  So, although the monthly low is similar, over the past couple of months, we are having day after day of those lows.  That can be seen in all the daily counts that are blue since November.  That explains why it feels colder this year.

We can see that this past spring had lower lows, but higher mean temperatures than in 2011.  Again, we weren’t here in 2011 and will soon be leaving the mild climate of Redwood City.  So we probably won’t get to experience a second Spring here.  It will be fun to learn more about other places in the SFBay as well as elsewhere along the Pacific coast.

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