Dog Days Coming to End

With Labor Day ahead and lots of kids heading back to school this week and next, summer really is taking a bow and preparing to exit. It has been a roller coaster summer on the weather front, the only front sailors and cruisers watch most carefully. In parts of the country, like the Gulf Coast, heavy rain and floods have created a lot of inconvenience and curtailed a bit of sailing time. In the mountain states and southwest, which is getting more arid every year, flash floods washed away cars and two people died in a Las Vegas flood. Southern California was spared and the summer cruising season went on as usual. In the northwest, unusual blazing heat created the most uncomfortable weather in living memory. In the northeast, the sun shone almost without interruption all summer. Good for sailing and extending the Dog Days, but bad for reservoirs and gardens. And now as we enter hurricane season in the North Atlantic and western Pacific, activity, once predicted to be busier than normal due to La Niña, has been benign. But wait, September is around the corner and NOAA announced on Monday that they were keeping a close eye on four, new tropical systems heading toward the Caribbean, Mexico and the US southeast. It looks like as the Dog Days of summer wane, we still have a roller coaster of weather to ride. Buckle up, it might be a bumpy fall.