Ah, the dog days of summer are here. With August upon us, it’s time for beach parties, backyard BBQs and boating trips. This is summer, right?




Well down here it’s more like duck for cover and keep that foul weather gear nearby.


While you guys up north have been enjoying what, from all reports, sounds like a fabulous summer with perfect weather, we Caribbean dwellers haven’t seen the sun all week. Or last week. Well, maybe she peeked her head out for a little bit last week, but that’s all. No kidding.




I know it’s Hurricane Season, our rainy season, and tropical waves passing by are just fine — as long as they don’t form into anything. Usually a tropical wave will whip up some wind, dump some rain and be on its merry little way.


Not so this month, or last month or the one before that. And I’m not just saying “oh, it seems like it’s been raining a lot.”  These aren’t just passing showers. No, we’ve had psycho rain. The kind that doesn’t let up, the kind of rain that hurts when it pelts you and comes down in sheets and doesn’t stop. And the deluge started well before Hurricane Season kicked off on June 1.




A friend of mine has been collecting rain data at his beautiful home on the North Shore of St. John since 1983, so I have the hard facts to back up my muddy sneakers.


May was the second wettest May since Reagan’s first term in office. And June? The wettest June my friend has ever recorded.




Guess what July looked like? It only took until July 19 to accumulate the amount of rain usually seen during the whole month. Since then we’ve gotten at least a few additional inches and judging from the radar, we’re not out of the woods yet. 

You might ask why you would care about the soggy weather down here. Well, the truth is, I had planned on penning an inspirational piece on the Virgin Islands National Park and its bounty of hiking trails.




I laced up my sneakers one morning to hit the trail and snap a few breath-taking images from atop Ram’s Head and Caneel Hill. But it was raining too hard to see out of my windshield.




“Oh, I’ll go tomorrow,” I thought. But it kept on raining. 




Last week, when the sun showed her face for a minute, I did make it to the trail head. But it started to rain and my hiking buddy threw in the towel.




I was going to brave the elements alone, until a battalion of mosquitoes made me turn on my muddy heels too. While I was waiting for the rain to stop my deadline passed and my publisher wouldn’t hold out any longer. 




I have resigned myself to the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain.”


I’ll write that amazing hiking story when the skies clear. In the meantime, I have to dump the bucket catching the leak from the hatch and replace the towel absorbing the rain on the companion-way.




So do enjoy your dog days of summer, but remember that it’s raining cats and….well, you know…dogs here.



Publishers Note: Don’t let the rain keep you away from these beautiful islands….you never know what mother nature will do in the next few weeks! You know what they say, “Every cloud has a silver lining!”