I have some friends who will be visiting me on St. John, and in the course of a conversation about what to bring and what to expect I was asked the question, “What’s the weather like?

Without thinking, I blurted out, “Cold!”

“What are you crazy,” came the reply, “I’m here in Rhode Island. It’s 33 degrees, and you’re telling me it’s cold?”

I restated my assessment of the weather and told my friend that true, relatively speaking it’s not really cold here, but it certainly is colder than normal.

I called another friend who lives on St. Thomas who lives to snorkel and fish. I wanted to invite him to go snorkeling with us one day while my friends were here. Without a prompt, he said, “I’d love to, but damn, it sure has been cold!”

“So you think it’s cold too,” I asked him.

“Are you kidding, it’s the coldest I remember it being ever,” he said. “As a matter of fact I was just speaking to Ed Gibney (who has lived on St. John his whole life) and he said that it’s the coldest winter he’s ever experienced.

I decided to do a little checking up of my own on this. I’ve been living here on and off for 40 years and I thought it’s been cold, but I wanted to ask some native St. Johnians what they remember.

In my informal, anecdotal and unscientific study of information garnered from a statistically insignificant sampling of St. John natives 5o years old or more, I ascertained that this is the coldest winter in recent memory.

Checking further, I looked at the weather forecast for next week and I find that the low lows, that is, the temperature at night on higher elevations is predicted to be a bone chilling 66 degrees. Of course the high highs, that is, the high temperature during the day at the beach is predicted to be a comfortable 85 degrees. I guess what they say about your blood thinning if you live here too long may be true. Eighty five sounds cold to me.

Should I tell my friends to bring sweaters?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 11:18 am and is filed under Life on St. John USVI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.