Highest Tide on A Cold Winter’s Storm

They called the storm a “bomb cyclone”.  I don’t even think they gave the storm a name.  It was a win­ter hur­ri­cane!  And it came on a very high tide.

I pre­pared in the usu­al way:  stock­ing the fridge, wheel­ing out and start­ing-up the portable gen­er­a­tor, and call­ing my father to make sure that he was pre­pared.  The fore­cast was for rain turn­ing to snow with one of those big pink lines in between that reads as the dread­ed “freez­ing rain”.  It had been freez­ing cold for over a week so I was wor­ried that we were set­ting up for the per­fect Ice Storm.  Pow­er would be out for days, my elder­ly moth­er would be frozen, and life as I knew it would go into a win­ter hold­ing pat­tern that involved a lot of fires in the fire­place and jig­saw puz­zles solved by candlelight.

On storm day, it was grey and rainy…and warm.  The wind was strong and gusty, but noth­ing crazy.  Of course, I could­n’t sit still.  “Let’s go for a dri­ve and check out the high tide” I sug­gest­ed to any­one that would lis­ten.  So off we went…

The first sign that some­thing was dif­fer­ent were the two deer that we encoun­tered on the side of Route 6A.  Although deer sight­ings on Cape Cod are not unusu­al, it was the first time I’d ever seen them on the side of Route 6A.  They were vis­i­bly wet and seemed a bit out of sorts.

As we con­tin­ued on our way to check things out, we could see that tide was high, in fact, it was start­ing to cross the road we were trav­el­ing on.  Nev­er­the­less, we ven­tured on.  Here are some pictures:

It turns out that high tide that was sched­ule to hit at 12:48pm was to be a 12.1 foot high tide.  They call these tides King Tides.  Suf­fice it to say, we came to our sens­es after wit­ness­ing some sig­nif­i­cant destruc­tion, some scared deer and more flood­ing than I’d ever seen before. We head­ed home just miss­ing being strand­ed and/or flood­ed at the marina.

Here’s hop­ing that the next time the High (est) Tides hit, it isn’t accom­pa­nied by a “bomb cyclone”!

Also here’s a link to the Cape Cod Times Arti­cle with pic­tures show­ing Route 6A flooded.

Jan­u­ary 2018