Hurricane Matthew - Location of Haiti Landfall

Just one of those threads that has no real relationship to the boards, but maybe there are some Floridians or South East U.S. coast residents like myself carefully watching where Hurricane Matthew goes, since it looks now to be closer to threatening the U.S. (and my hometown!).
Not many people have been to the remote parts of Haiti away from the capital (for that matter, not many people have been to Haiti PERIOD), and even frequent cruisers like myself have rarely been close enough to even see anything of Haiti's remote west coast off the Tiburon peninsula other than distant silhouettes of mountains. One cruise, years ago, for some reason made an unusual very close pass to Haiti's Tiburon coast, enough so that we could make out buildings, even people, with binoculars. It was just a day at sea, but for me, especially since I had my long lenses with me, it was a fun opportunity to do some extreme telephoto and cropping to see that coastline, and the isolated, poor, but generally better off people in those small towns and villages (though almost all of Haiti is desperately poor, those who are removed from the corruption, crime, gangs, and mess of the capital Port-Au-Prince and other larger cities have it better off most of the time). Unfortunately, those communities were hit fairly hard by the earthquake in 2011, and now, this is the very location where at 7am this morning, Hurricane Matthew made landfall at Category 4 intensity - I don't have too much hope that these tiny villages right on the beach will have faired very well, and hopefully the people evacuated to the hills and a solid shelter.
It made me go back and look at some of my snaps of that beautiful, mountainous, and lush coastline on that one cruise where we got close enough to see...and I figured it might be fun to post them.

A wide shot, taken with my NEX-5N, of the cloud-shrouded mountainous terrain:


A wide panorama taken with the NEX:


A look at the coast with a 55-210mm lens:


A more distant look at one of those small villages, Carcasse, Haiti:


A local herder with his flock on a steep hillside:


A closer look at Carcasse with a 300mm & 1.4x teleconverter, shows that while the mountains are very high, the villages themselves are extremely low-lying:


Another distant village, seen with the 300mm & TC:


Stand-up boater moving along the rugged coast:


I hope these little villages, or at least the villagers, made it through safely today - and we Floridians, along with the Cubans and Bahamians, are all keeping a wary eye on where Matthew goes next!

 

Thanks! Haven't heard too much update from Haiti yet, but the country's minister hinted that they're already hearing of some destruction in the area...I won't be surprised if there are losses there, in the dozens. As of the 11am advisory today, we are officially in 'hurricane watch' from Deerfield Beach north to Brevard county. Hopefully it won't turn to 'hurricane warning' by tomorrow. Watch means you MIGHT experience up to hurricane force winds within 48 hours...Warning means you WILL.

 

Yay! We're in hurricane WARNING. Should be getting a might chippy here tomorrow afternoon into evening. Even though we're likely getting the left shoulder and not the full eye wall hit, if this thing comes in at a high Cat 3 to Cat 4, we could see winds approaching what Wilma brought in 2005, at a mid-Cat 2. Good thing is, I've got hurricane glass already in my house, so I don't need to worry about putting up shutters, and the winds are mostly going to hit from direct north - and my house is an L shaped ranch with the winds hitting the bottom of the L...a cinder-block wall with few windows. For these types of storms, I just haul all my patio furniture into the crook of the L of my house...the winds will go straight over and around.

Hunkering down in South Florida!

 

All clear down here...Matthew was kind enough to jog out to the north and east a bit, around 5pm yesterday while passing Freeport, Bahamas...and that took it a bit farther out to sea as it passed us, and pushed the eye-wall and hurricane force winds just out of our county - the next county north got hurricane force, we only got tropical storm force here. Of course, I don't wish hurricane force winds on anyone, and hopefully our fellow statesmen up north come through this OK, but I'm certainly glad the hurricane winds didn't come to my town - we've had quite enough of that in our past!