I've never seen "Phenomenal" in a shipping forcast before.

Thursday 3rd February 2011
It was very windy first thing and there had been hail overnight but we are told that there is much worse to come. Most of the ferries to the mainland or between the islands are cancelled but surprisingly the ferry to Westray is still sailing. Westray is one of the outer northern isles. Maybe they are made of sterner stuff out there and refuse to let a small thing like a hurricane disrupt their travel plans.

I had a look at the inshore shipping forecast and for Cape Wrath (well named) on the north coast od Scotland a bit to the west of us, the sea state was given as "high to very high, occassionally phenomenal". I have never heard of phenomenal in a forecast before so I checked on google and it is the worst sea state that they have and means waves over 45 feet tall. To my mind that is not a wave, it is a whole series of tsunamies, one after the other for mile after mile. I hope nobody is going to be out in it. I think that even the folk from Westray may decide that it is not a good day to go fishing.

Tonight the wind really got up and at one point I was concerned that the living room window may come in. It is a big picture window which is all well and good on nice sunny days but it is about 12 foot wide. This is not such a good thing on windy days. We could see the whole frame flexing in the wind. The window is held in the frame by about 3/4 inch seal all round and with the amount it was flexing I could imagine it just flipping itself out of the frame. So I closed the curtains.
This was much better as I could not see what was happening, I also felt that if it did come in then the curtains may stop some of the shards of glass from hurtling across the living room and impaling me to the settee.

Molly got spoiled and I fetched her box in from the porch so that she could sleep in the house. She gets frightened when the wind gets really high and starts howling loudly round the porch. I also put the radio on for her tuned to the World service so at least she will be slightly better educated by the morning.