It seems at the beginning of every season, when we’re finally ready to depart from wherever we’ve spent the Southern Summer, we find ourselves impatiently sitting in front of the computer, watching the weather as the weeks quickly slip by.
The winds promise to take you swiftly and effortlessly offshore, in just the right direction, only to strand you days later or carry you off to where you never intended to go. So we wait. We’ve gotten pretty good at waiting.
We imagine our entrapment this season is due to it being the tail-end of an El Niño year, or maybe it’s our lower-than-normal latitude, or poor timing, but either way we’ve become very, very stuck in Nelson. An unrelenting and uninterrupted succession of lows barreling in from Australia has all but shut down the Tasman, and turned the Cook Strait into a stretch of water that even the titanic ferries cross with caution. Lest you be fooled by Nelson’s sunny disposition, no one is going anywhere.