Thursday, September 26th, First Hurricane of 2024
3:50 PM Thursday: We've been tracking the storm all day. It is hitting and flooding in Tampa area right now. We've had some gusty winds but they go away. Every now and then it starts to rain a LOT and we think "there it is" and then it stops. We've already had around 15" of rain this month so we're not short on water.
The sky is bright white/gray, the sun is making if very bright in spite of total cloud cover. After I make this post I'm going to close the upstairs shutter. If it gets bad outside I will close all the shutters before we go to bed.
The baby chickens are alarmed by the sound of the wind and rain. The muscovy ducks are sitting around in the yard napping. "Rain, we don't care about no rain". They ARE ducks. All rain has currently stopped here in Melbourne.
Periods of heavy downpour are punctuated with no-showers, up high in the pine trees and the tops of the bamboo garden we can see some wind turbulence but down here on ground the wind is barely noticeable (which is nice :-).
As it turned out, that was almost our last shower of the day, this hurricane was not much of a rain maker for us.
__________________________________________________________
Friday, September 27th, aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Melbourne Florida
4:15 PM Friday: This is my final post in the play by play of this hurricane (with great thanks, it wasn't much of a storm for us here in Melbourne). It is gone now, it blew some wind here in Melbourne last night around 11PM until around 2AM when it lessoned dramatically.
Rainfall: The hurricane delivered around 1.00" of total rain according to our rain gauge, not much from a typical afternoon shower here in the rainy season. This brings our yearly rainfall total up to 83".
I know many folks lost power and were inundated with water, we're praying for them. We never lost power and our Starlink satellite internet connection remained solid throughout the whole storm event.
Our electric hurricane shutters by Rolltite worked flawlessly. It's great to be able to close the place up without having to nail up plywood over the windows (or worse).
At this point, we're hopeful that was our last major storm this year. Time will tell.
Baby-Peep was laying an egg when the storm hit so she rode it out in a wooden dog crate out on the screened-in porch. There were also 23 baby chicks, five adolescent Dominic hens and two Old English barred bantam hens (the Finches :-) out on the screened-in porch enduring all the wind noise of the storm. Everybody was fine today.
One of the Wayfair runs was picked up and turned upside down by the hurricane wind. It only took us a minute to right it and get it ready for playtime today.
A couple of the older plastic tarps that provide shade on some of the Wayfair runs were shredded by the wind, we keep replacements in stock and had it all put back together quickly thanks to Mary's strong hands.
