The Eye of The Needle

New Bern, NC
35 05.91 N 077 01.95 W

The news from Vermont and New York is sobering.  Lake Champlain is flooding at record high levels.  It is about 11 feet higher than its normal summer level.   Not only that, it is very stormy up there and high winds continue to churn the lake into a tempest.

The rivers and creeks are also very inhospitable to boats right now.  Swelled with flood waters, the currents rage, the high levels prevent docks from deployment and the waters are full of floating debris.

Even here in the Carolinas, we arrived a mere week after the passage of one of the most destructive spring cold fronts ever that spawned many hundreds of tornadoes. Hopefully, we've seen that last of those as spring weather transitions to summer weather..

On the southern end of our sandbox, hurricane season starts in just three weeks.   It is yet to be seen what that brings.

While all this is going on to the north and south, we continue to enjoy splendid balmy weather.  Not violent, not cold, not hot.

I've blogged before about how we pace our migrations so as to avoid bad weather to the north and the south.  This year seems to illustrate that point to the extreme.   We are threading the eye of the needle weather wise.  It reminds me of what my friend Bob on Carpe Diem says, "We don't live in a boat, we live on a boat."  That expresses it very well.  

Part of the great pleasures of this life style is that we live out in the weather than "ordinary" people.  When it is nice, we enjoy it more.  We avoid bad weather, but when it comes we live more at risk.  I'm pretty sure that gets to the core of the attractive appeal of cruising to some people, and to the fear and repulsion of other people.