"Ha ha, you missed me. Now you gotta kiss me." Isn't that how the old playground taunt goes? In the case of Cyclone Lusi, playground taunting may not be a good idea. Her kiss - or a kiss by one of her playmates - might not be something one would ask for. Luckily, though, Lusi WAS a miss.

The days preceding her arrival were rather scary, given that the forecasts were calling for a direct hit on Auckland, where we and our boat Double Diamond were located at the time. Predicting the exact path of a cyclone is tricky stuff even in this day and age of advancing cyclone prediction technology. The orientation and shape of New Zealand makes it even trickier.

In the northern hemisphere, cyclones (or hurricanes as they a called in the Americas) typically move from warm southern waters into the cool northern waters where they degrade into wet weather systems and eventually die. Here in the southern hemisphere, cyclones typically move from north to south - again from warm water to cool.

What makes New Zealand a bit unique is that it too is oriented roughly north to south (technically speaking it runs NE to SW - should technical be your bent). It is a long, thin shape that while 1000 miles long, is only 250 miles wide at its widest point. In downtown Auckland, we walked from west coast water to east coast water in a day - a total of 16km.

For a cyclone that is also traveling north to south, the shape and orientation of New Zealand makes it something of a tough target to hit. A storm track of 100 miles east or west either way can be the difference between a direct hit and a near miss. In the end, Lusi wandered east from the original forecast track by about 100 miles. For us in Auckland, that made all the difference in the world. Farther south down the island, Lusi did make landfall, but by then she was in cooler waters and much less powerful - a tropical storm as opposed to a cyclone. Instead of serious damage, Lusi left a lot of farmers grateful for the rain - and some farmers frustrated because they didn't get enough.

The only damage we suffered from Lusi was to our sailing calendar. We had all our business in Auckland pretty much wrapped up almost a week before her arrival, but decided that staying put in a safe harbor was a better plan than setting sail and taking our chances at finding a secure anchorage somewhere out in the islands of the Huraki Gulf - even though that is where we were aching to go.

If there has been any compensation for having been stuck in port, it has been the weather post-Lusi. Weather the past few weeks since Lusi's departure has been "fantastic". While at home everyone is touting the arrival of spring, here it is fall and so far, the fall weather has been wonderful - cyclones aside. For the most part, warm clear days in the 70's (20 Celsius in the rest of the non-US world) and coolish nights make the whining we did in our earlier blog about what poor luck we've had with weather sound kind of, um, whiney.

What did I hear a New Zealander call this fall weather the other day? "Indian Summer"??? It seems that American culture does influence the world in a variety of ways, even to seasonal nomenclature. At the same time, there are quite a few Indians in metropolitan Auckland - but they are actually from India.


Lusi's path as forecast several days in advance.


Lusi's path as it (more or less) happened.