The Bahamas weather game.

We play a bit of a cat and mouse game with the weather here, looking for different places to anchor, and choosing our travelling days, depending on the forecast. To give you some idea of how that works, and why weather is such a feature in our daily life right now, here's my little primer on Bahamas weather.

What happens is that the weather systems are dominated by a bubble of high pressure that lives in the Atlantic and is then disrupted by low pressure depressions rolling off the US coast and across the north atlantic. If the high pressure is stable and large, it squeezes the normal winds into a narrower, faster band and we get stronger winds from the north east. We all go hide behind the western side of an island.

The depressions that head across the US and Atlantic are the big winter storms, often packing near hurricane force winds up north, and ending up in Europe dumping rain and strong winds on all of you over there. They form when a large lump of cold air 'captures' a wedge of warm air and the resulting flows start to turn and move as the rising warm air is replaced by the cold air. Each side of this wedge of warm air is a 'front', and as the depression moves eastwards, these fronts trail across the Bahamas. Because the air is very different each side, the winds change dramatically as they pass.

First comes the warm front. The normal north easterly winds move into the south then around to the south west as the front passes. In weaker systems, this is often fairly gentle winds, nothing to worry much about. For the stronger fronts, we scoot across to the Eastern side of an island for a bit. But watch out, because that's usually a bad place to be when the second, cold front arrives.

The cold front brings a line of dark cloud, a sudden change in the wind, into the north, and strengthening too. Not surprisingly, it's also colder. This is when you hunker down and play a board game or make sure you are in town exploring instead of sitting on the beach being wind and sandblasted. It passes after a day and usually things go back to nice and calm for a bit until the next system repeated the pattern after a few days, or if not, the high pressure gets stronger and throws a few days of strong trade winds at us. This year has been a bit less settled, so we have generally had three days of really nice, a couple of days of a front, a couple more of strong trades then back to really nice.

But it's never really cold, nor really windy, more inconveniences than dangers but up here, you can't take you eyes off the weather forecast like you can further south where it's always blowing from the east.

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