Friday, August 24, 2007

hot and sunny....whats the weather like where you are?

Busy busy in Antigua. Usually August is a fairly slow month for us in Antigua with nice weather in general in North American and in Europe. This August has been very busy here on the island with many of the hotels being quite full. I know after speaking to my Grandmother who lives in England, that the weather there has been terrible. She said its been the worst summer that she can remember up there which is why so many people have been coming here looking for sun. We took a group of people out on a private birthday charter and so many were moaning about how awful the British weather had been. And apart from a few days in August it has been an incredibly sunny summer here in Antigua and Barbuda with drought on the islands being a big problem until recently. People all over the world are so obsessed with weather and when you have put up with rain, snow, cold and clouds for most of the year I guess you would be kinda worried that your Antigua holiday may not be sunny. I always see people on the internet forums worrying about the possibility of rain and clouds ruining their upcoming Antigua and Barbuda vacation. Way way way too many people look at the animated forecasts which I have spoken so much about on other blogs (here). I often wonder how many people cancel their travel plans because of these misleading low tech forecasts and keep telling people to look at satellite photos in motion to see where the clouds will be coming from. A good link is:
For hurricane info there is http://www.weathercarib.com/ or http://www.stormcarib.com/ for reports, but for general weather a good link is always http://www.windguru.com/int/index.php?sc=52075
I have a web tracker on my Antigua blog and look at it often to see where the hits are coming from, which sites referred the hit to mine, and which key words were used in searches. After Hurricane Dean passed by missing Antigua and Barbuda I had hundreds of hits a day. The busiest day was nearly 700 hits and so many of the hits came from google or other search engine queries. The typical search on google was “Did hurricane Dean damage Antigua” or simply “hurricane Dean Antigua”. There were quite a few specific hotel requests like “jumby bay damage Hurricane Dean”. Anyway, I am so happy that my little blog could show people that we had no hurricane damage other than some beach erosion on the south of Antigua and set them at ease. Funny how things work with these blogs but with the web tracker I can see how Antigua internet searches in times of uncertainty can be of great help.
This week has been a busy one for me with work on the boats and many birthday parties including my own little one last night. I took this photo at the end of a very good friend's 40th on sunday night. That was a lovely one on the beach which as a matter of fact got more sand on it during the storm.

I think this weekend will be a chilled out one with possibly a little fishing and windsurfing. I am thinking of doing several blog reports with photos about learning how to windsurf so that people can almost have a lesson during their lunch brake back in the big city office.
Keep checking for updates and have a good weekend.