Living on a Caribbean island during hurricane season is like standing in a shooting gallery with a bull's eye painted on your chest. Sooner or later you're gonna get hit.
Gert was trouble from infancy. Spawned late Tuesday as a tropical depression drifting lazily west of the Azores, within 48 hours she was packing 100+ mph winds and headed directly for St. Chris in the northeast Caribbean Sea. A Thursday morning hurricane watch was upgraded late that evening to a hurricane warning.
The Friday morning front page of The Coconut Telegraph, our tabloid size daily, screamed "Gert Takes Aim on St. Chris!" in a banner headline over a half-page hurricane map embellished with the storm track. A dotted line indicating the projected path looked like a tracer bullet whizzing straight across the thirty-five square mile crescent shaped island. But Gert wasn't the only tempest brewing.