Hone (Hoe-Nay) & The Rest

A hurricane almost hit the north side of the island the year that we moved out here. That would have been a lovely cap to Kauai's first COVID year (and that might have been the year north side got cut off anyway, due to a landslide down the one road; we've been here long enough now that the years are starting to muddle). But, that's been our main experience for tropical storms. Until this year.

My dad and Mary left the island last Monday to visit my sister & fam. Things were looking fine when they left, but by the afternoon the National Hurricane Center was predicting that two disturbances each had a 90% chance of forming into a big storm. Meanwhile, Gilma, which was forming out by Mexico, was increasingly looking like it was heading this way.

Hone, the first of them (given a Hawaiian name because it formed in the Central Pacific) passed by in the wee hours last night, but we definitely had days of wind (and a bit of rain) before it.

I was out in Kapaa at the bike trail (Ke Ala Hele Makālae) on Saturday, which runs along the ocean on the East Shore, and the water was amazing. All white caps and surging waves, some of it even hitting rock walls that protect the head of the trail and splashing up onto the trail itself! (Which I don't think I've ever seen.)

I don't think we've had any tropical storms this size since we moved here (other than that hurricane but it turned out to be a total non-event), but we've had some pretty big storms nonetheless (including the Kona Low that saturated the islands last time we went to Oahu), and they always remind me that we're on a teeny little island in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, and that we're even teenier in the face of some of these storms. I totally understand the lyrics to Lee Ann Womack's "I Hope You Dance."

My dad has been a radio operator since he was young, so one of the concerns was his radio antenna, which he lowered a few feet to the ground before he left, but which is still sticking well up from his house. He'd apparently totally dropped it down previously on his summer trips, but after years of that decided it was a waste, and he'd checked the upcoming weather before he left any way ....

There was obviously concern about Hone taking it down. We talked about me pulling it down the rest of the way, but he said he thought it was a two-man job for someone not familiar with doing so (a two-man job involving climbing a ladder and knowing the weight of an antenna you were dropping down). So we just kept an eye on the storm, and though it came pretty darned close to the Big Island, it kept running straight west from there, which means it was a fair amount south of us (since the archipelago runs northwestwest from the Big Island). The winds definitely got up there on Saturday and Sunday. I think we were running 20-25 mph winds at the worst, with gusts higher than that. I visited the antenna Saturday (on my way out to Kapaa) and Sunday (as a nice afternoon walk in the breezy day) and it looked OK both times. The winds started dropping Sunday night, so I'll visit it one more time after I drop Kimberly off for PT this afternoon, and we'll cross our fingers all is OK.

I should say, absent concerns about antennas, and absent storms actually hitting our island, I love these wet, gray tropical storms. We have a view out the back of our house up a valley and on the far, far side of it you can see Black Mountain (which is probably 15 miles away or so, but it's a major landmark on this side of the island). Whenever a storm wells up (other than the Kona Lows), it comes from that direction, and so Black Mountain disappears as it's covered by gray, and then the storm rushes toward us, eventually running up that valley and dumping rain. We're right on a ridgeline and so the weirdest thing is we can often look out our back window and see rain and our front window and see sun.

We've got two more storms coming, Gilma and Hector. Gilma is the closer one, forecast to hit Saturday and it looks like it's going to run much closer to the island, but on the north side, and it's forecast to be a tropical depression by the time it gets here, which means the wind will be less than half of Hone's (which was briefly a hurricane as it passed the Big Island). Hector will follow early in the week after that, but is similarly expected to be a Depression before it gets to the islands.

Apparently the 1-2 punch of named storms is rare, let alone 1-2-3, but apparently August is also the month they tend to most often visit our islands.

So, a wet, wild week or two, but hopefully not wild enough to put that antenna in danger again (let alone the island).