“I might say a little more about the cloud formations we noticed since it was my job on this day to note them and take pictures of them while the other observer tried to compute pressure. Ahead of the storm here at Morrison Field on the morning of the sixteenth, we got a good picture of pre-hurricane thunderstorms. Squalls with forty-mile gusts swept across the runways. The rain came down in sheets so that we could watch it move toward us like a dark wall. Some of the boys out loading one of the ships for evacuation saw one of these terrific showers bearing down on them and they started to run for cover. The water was moving faster than they could run and before they’d moved fifty feet they were soaked to the skin. On the morning of the seventeenth, it lay just off the Georgia coast and had started to re-deepen. We flew up the eightieth meridian though it was hard to hold any steady course. As some of the navigators have probably mentioned, we could see our own drift. After we noted a good windshift into the east to assure us that we were in the northeast quadrant, we headed across current for the center and once there headed roughly for the great outside to the west. With such terrific drift, I don’t see how anyone knew where he was going. “Heading north: The usual over-water five-tenths stratocumulus bases at two thousand, tops at thirty-five hundred, gradually began to lower at about one hundred twenty-five miles from the center to roughly eight hundred feet, and a fairly solid lower layer of clouds. Flying above this layer at about forty-five hundred feet we could see tall bulging cumulus and thickening altostratus at about fifteen thousand ahead. There were other thin layers of stratocumulus and altostratus, but it wasn’t until we got within fifty miles or so of the center and the rain really began to come down and the cumulus were as thick as trees in a forest that these intermediary layers began to thicken and thatch in between the tall cumulus the way they do in any well-developed storm system. By fifty miles out we were in solid cloud and heavy rain. Picture-taking became impossible except in the occasional breaks mentioned above. Even these breaks, if they should come out, would show little because continuous instrument weather, to me at least, looks pretty much the same whether it’s part of a violent hurricane or smooth circulation stratus over a seaboard town. You can see the wing tips and not much more. “If a general conclusion is necessary, mine would simply be that I’d just as soon not tempt fate in any more such storms.” Sometimes birds such as Lieutenant Gray describes are carried hundreds of miles before they escape from the hurricane. Species from Florida have been found as far north as New England. _11._ TRICKS OF THE TRADE