Sailor Claims He Can 'Feel' the Wind Shift, Gets Knocked Down by Gust He Did Not Feel

Experienced cruiser Martin Barometer was knocked down by a sudden squall on Long Island Sound Saturday, approximately eight seconds after telling his crew he could 'feel' wind shifts before they happened and had 'never once been surprised by weather.' 'I was explaining my system,' Barometer recounted from the cockpit, where he was bailing water with a bucket. 'I told them I read the clouds, I feel the pressure changes on my skin, I observe the wave state. I said, and I quote, the wind talks to me. Then a thirty-five-knot gust hit us broadside and we went over far enough to put the spreaders in the water.' Crew member Susan Leeway, who was below decks when the knockdown occurred and was struck by a flying jar of peanut butter, offered her account. 'He was literally saying the words I always know when the wind is about to when the wind demonstrated that he did not, in fact, know.' The squall, which meteorological data shows developed rapidly from a line of cumulonimbus clouds visible on the western horizon for approximately forty-five minutes prior to the knockdown, produced sustained winds of 30 knots with gusts to 38. 'The clouds were right there,' said Leeway, pointing to photographs she had taken of the approaching storm front. 'I asked him about them an hour before. He said they were just fair-weather cumulus and that his body was telling him we were fine.' Barometer has since attributed the incident to 'a communication breakdown between me and the atmosphere' and insists his wind-sensing abilities remain intact. He has purchased a portable weather station, which he describes as 'a backup system for when the wind and I aren't speaking.'