Penzance - Atlantic air but still warm

[Graham Easterling]

Lovely sunshine, right on windward coasts.  Quite big swell still, - as I discovered yesterday. 

A bit of uplift required to generate cloud this afternoon, as the webcam picture from Sennen shows.

Still getting over 20C, tomorrow looks like the day of the real change.

Why is every drowning suddenly thermal shock? A BBC news report today said XX people have now died of thermal shock during the hot weather. No XX people have drowned. (almost certainly more in practice - it's just the ones the know of). I don't remember even hearing the term in the old days. In my younger days my best mate was a lifeguard at Sennen, nobody died of thermal shock. The most common drowning was actually people swept off rocks. Now there's a craze for saunas next to the beach. (Sennen, Penzance, Newlyn etc.) If anybody is at risk of thermal shock, those are the ones. People use to just drown, with some description of the actual cause (swept out to sea, boat sank, fishing off rocks caught by a wave, no experience of swimming outdoors, tried to swim back from an inflatable, cut off by the tide, swept downstream etc). I think it's just lazy reporting.

Graham

Penzance