Sailing with My Brother Before He Died and Surfing with Him After

By W Goodwin

The third storm of the 2018 hurricane season was named Chris. The storm passed close to Cape Hatteras, a few miles to the east of where my younger brother died (seems like yesterday). His name was also Chris, and he died from unknown causes while asleep on his boat at a marina in North Carolina.

Chris was always thoughtful of others and so I had to wonder why he would reappear in the guise of a hurricane. Why was he on this stormy track? Then I saw the answer.

I am a life-long surfer who now lives in Jensen Beach on the east coast of Florida. Our local surf spots on Hutchinson Island are flat most of the time because the Bahamas to the east and south and Cape Hatteras to the north block almost all swells the open Atlantic might me moved to generate. The beaches and inlets of Hutchinson Island possess a very narrow window of about twenty-five degrees through which waves can approach, so unless a storm is in that rarely-used northeast window, we get no waves. Guess where Chris (the storm) was?

The first swells from Chris began peeling off our sandy coast and the waves lasted for at three days. Winds were ideal, either offshore or lightly onshore and the wave period will be in the vicinity of 11 seconds. Those facts translated to Chris giving us…