weather perceptions

This morning its bucketing down with rain, again. My firm belief was that this is a record wet month, that it has rained nearly every day blah blah blah. 

But, notwithstanding us getting high rainfall in the next 48hours, we're actuallybang on average, so far. We're 19 days into May which has 31 days, and the average rainfall for May is for 68mm falling on 11 days. With 12 days to go, we're actually bang on to a fraction of millimeter. We will probably go over the average, but my perception was that we've had unprecedented falls. Not true.

Unfortunately, today is pretty extreme with the possible formation of an "East Coast Low" offshore. If we were located in a lower latitude (ie: closer to the equator) we'd be referring to the suswtem as a potential cyclone. So 30knots, 3m seas and lots of rain. Not ideal sailing weather even though when I was a younger sailor, the period after Easter was considered the time to head north. Its getting into the time when the weather cools and offshore winds predominate. I can recall days, and nights, of beautifully calm sailing offshore. No swell to mention, glassy or lightly catpawed sea with a cool SW over the port quarter. There were no real concerns with bar crossings due to the lack of swell. 

Bit on the previous 6 years or so we've experienced two East Coast Lows that took life; one known as  The Pasha Bulker Storm when a collier by that name was shipwrecked just by the port entrance, and a second closely associated with flooding in Dungog. In both events. Lives were lost by flood waters, in Dungog a block of aged care units were fully inundated. 

While this could be my perception of changing weather, I recall as a young teen, the May '74 storm, them known as The Sygna Storm, one blowy and wet Saturday night when the ship Sygna was shipwrecked on Stockton Bight, several miles both of the port.  That was a destructive storm on Newcastle. My parents spent some of the night lashing down a window among that had party broken loose of it's moorings. The Peter's Ice Cream Factory, all of four stories of brick structure blew down over Darby Street. Apart from young people (like me) stirring to do paper runs, most of the city was vacant for the weekend and I cannot recall loss of life back then. An, but is this another perception? Let's Google it.

Well, that's astonishing. AI is saying "600 lives and 600 ships were lost at sea". That's completely untrue? The crew of the ship were all resumed ashored, and there is detail of a fellow on a vehicle being washed way at Swansea. If there was as much carnage as AI presents, then I would  recall some of that. I doubt there would be 600 ships on the entire eastern seaboard of Australia at the time.