Sept 12, 2023

First and most obviously, we send our heartfelt sympathy to all those impacted by Canada’s record-setting wildfire season this summer. Especially; the fires in the Okanagan were shocking. What a sad and terrible thing to have hit our country. Every province seemed to have experienced these natural disasters. The smoke and smell from the wildfires was everywhere.

We would like to get a better sense of what the impact was on our industry during the hottest summer on record. If you have comments or information to share, please send an email to me personally at aadams@kerrwil.com . And, we are not done yet for this year it seems. 

This week I’m following Hurricane Lee with great trepidation. By the time you are reading this on Tuesday September 12^th, we will have a better sense of whether Hurricane Lee is turning north and into the mid-Atlantic away from the east coast, or if it is likely to make landfall as the week unfolds.

Our Publisher Jill Snider and I will be heading to a press event in New York city on Monday the 18^th and our arrival could coincide with Hurricane Lee depending on how the weather patterns play out.

Our own Atlantic provinces may also be at risk (again) and we are not as familiar with hurricanes as boaters are in Florida or the Bahamas. They say the record-breaking heat of summer 2023 has made the ocean hotter and that hot water has already caused Hurricane Lee to strengthen at an historic pace into a powerful Category 5 hurricane rarely seen in the Atlantic Ocean.

Lee, which was a Category 1 storm Thursday September 14, intensified with exceptional speed in warm ocean waters, doubling its wind speeds in just a day.

Lee has already hit a rare strength that few storms have ever achieved. Only 2% of storms in the Atlantic reach Category 5 strength, according to NOAA’s hurricane database.

Category 5 is the highest level on the hurricane wind speed scale and has no maximum point. Hurricanes hit this level when their sustained winds reach 157 mph or higher. A 165-mph storm like Lee is the same category as Hurricane Allen, the Atlantic’s strongest hurricane on record, which topped out at 190 mph in 1980.

We recently ran a story from BoatUS about how to prepare your boat to survive a hurricane and you can easily search for that good advice on our website at www.boatingindustry.ca. Scientists have been predicting the rise of extreme weather events for many years and it seems that these ominous predictions are coming true much more frequently now.

We truly hope that you enjoyed good weather this season but we are very interested in your comments and will share those in the coming editions.

Wishing you fair winds this fall.

Andy Adams – Editor