Blowmaggedon in Brighton

Winds of 99 mph were clocked on the Isle of Wight. Apparently the storm came north around the Isle of Wight, then turned East to go up the Channel, hitting the South East coastline, before turning inland. Trees are down all over the place. There's some flooding and there are power outages, but we're fine.

There's a huge old tree down in front of the house immediately behind ours. I may have heard it come down - there was a huge double thump in the middle of the night that woke me.  It was probably planted when the houses were built in
the early 19th century. There's a car completely contained in the branches. The owner moved it last night to what seemed a 'safer' place.

The day dawned bright and sunny after a night of howling wind and driving rain.  The wind is still fierce - 35 to 45 mph. We went to the seafront to have a look around. A version of this exact picture appeared on the front page of nearly every national newspaper this morning.  That's a news crew, taking pictures, by the way.

You can see what happened to the poor boat, Placebo.  It is very battered and it moved about 100 yards down the beach from where it was yesterday. This is at low tide. I'm curious to see what high tide brings at 6pm.

The water is so white with the foam whipped up by the winds, that it looks like milk when it crashes on the beach.

Even in the lee of the marina breakwater, the sea looks almost white with foam.  I hope you can see it - it's not a great picture.

This picture is from the BBC - kids playing in the foam by the marina this morning.

And here, for no reason except that it made me laugh is a big dog who wanted to play in a puddle despite his owner's wishes.

We're home for lunch and then we are going to walk toward downtown on the seafront. We've heard nothing about damage to the pier, but there are definitely amusement park rides missing at the end of the pier - they may have been dismantled as a precaution. There was plenty of warning. Clacton-on-Sea lost the roller coaster from their pier.

Despite trees down all over, there are only 3 deaths reported. A 17 year old died when a tree crashed down onto her house and hit her in her bed.  A 50 year old man died, in another tree falling incident and a 14 year old was swept out to sea while swimming yesterday. They called off the search when conditions became too dangerous for the life boat crews.  Tragic, all of them.