Weather Channel
This is Belize: Nature serves up a spectacle this morning and gratitude runs amuck

The breeze, steady as ever through the night, picked up urgency around 5:30 this morning. The time is a guess. The first water taxi hadn’t yet sped up the coast. The bell-curve thump-and-rumble of that boat is like a morning cock’s crow to mainlanders. Only more pleasant.
It was still too black out to see, but my wind gauge was beginning to go off the charts.
I use the rustle of the coconuts and palms posted outside my bedroom window as a reliable source of wind information. Slightly breezy and they sound like waves lapping against the beach.
In fact, I’ve learned to distinguish the lapping of waves against the rustle of fronds. It is an art that takes time to train a keen ear. It often requires lying very still in bed, listening closely to the sounds and then opening one eye, ever so slightly, to observe the weather outside and measure it against the assumptions. Read the rest of this entry »
Video of flooding on Macal and Mopan rivers in San Ignacio
Drone catches aerial view of flooding in San Ignacio Town, Bullet Tree and surrounding areas in the Cayo District from Hurricane Earl, posted by Victor Castillo.
From Ak’Bol to Caribbean Villas, Ambergris Caye coast nearly stripped of piers

What’s up dock?
This morning I found the owners of Ak’Bol Yoga Retreat down shore, retrieving canvas curtains and polls from their lovely palapa studio. Which no longer exists. Later some friends told me that the top to the gazebo that once crowned our own dock was down shore and intact on a beach.
“It still has its light fixture.”
A dive shop owner told me he was able to find his compressors underwater and about half of his 60 air tanks.
Everywhere you looked today, people were off in search of their docks, their gear, some remnant of their life that blew away in the Category 1 hurricane Earl last night. Read the rest of this entry »
This is Belize: Earl is beginning to make some waves

Still a few hours before the serious side of Earl begins to show himself but already he’s making himself known.
Already some planks on our dock are showing an independent streak. There will be some gaps before this night is done.
Mostly it has been intermittent drenchings and bigger than normal waves. Already our little retaining wall is proving no match for the waves, and fairly modest waves at that. The sky is a somber gray but the light still projects an eerie brightness, as if the air itself is burning phosphorescence. That, and the constant rumbling as the Caribbean’s massive waves trip over the barrier reef. Read the rest of this entry »
This is Belize: We prepare, we sit and we wait . . . for Earl?

We woke up this morning to a glorious Caribbean sunrise with swatches of blue sky amid the gauzy clouds and golden amber glow. A flat sea, still wind and barely visible reef greeted me and my cup of coffee. And mosquitoes, the most murderous panicky mosquitoes I have ever encountered here.
Tonight, I suspect, will reveal to us one of those many variations of hell that the imaginations of god-fearing mortals have conjured through the ages.
This hell has a name and it is Earl. Read the rest of this entry »