Batten the Hatches Kapenaars!

KABOOM! It will be carnage at times with extreme gusts of wind from before (or after) lunch. Windy

Bring in your lacy laundry this evening, or you might find it tangled in a tree somewhere near Baardskeedersbos on Saturday after the fiercest storm to hit Cape Town in years (or quite some time) has had its way with you and yours, and your puppy.

From today's beautiful sunny, still conditions, the cosmos goes pear-shaped (isn't it already that shape?) overnight and into Friday. It's literally the lull before a moerse storm, with the still airs of today freshening to staunch NW in the early hours tomorrow, but the worse will be still to come.

The front comes in stages. Stage 1 - from 3am to 8am - is a relatively benign gnaw-wester at 20kts, the ocean going choppy and broken up. A 6-8ft westerly groundswell at 15 seconds starts to break up into chunks, particularly from breakfast time or just after. Now Stage 2 starts to kick. The wind is less gnaw-wester, and more wailing and gnashing of teeth. By mid morning, its pumping a gale.

PURPLE PEOPLE EATER: The swell is going to be quite big come early Saturday morning. Windy

Over lunch and into the early arvi, the ocean is increasingly torn asunder. We're getting a Stage 3 snotklap as wind-whipped white caps scythe across a growing windswell that's being blasted over the top of the underlying groundswell. Teeth are grinding like a zombie's death rattle. The wind is something fierce by about 3pm, and the waves are slowly responding, with a scoured ocean reaching 10-12 foot at its highest (so far), within a sea resembling smashed puree buffeting around your bath like you're throwing a tantrum with the orange rubber duckie.

Then its Stage 4, and the weather and wind, and rain, has gone nuclear.Cancel that little kayak off Sea Point, unless you want to be found washed up on the beach at Marion Island in the southern Atlantic next week, pending currents and winds and whoever cares about your survival. The storm reaches a crescendo tomorrow evening between 4pm and 7pm, when wind speeds across the Cape Peninsula will be smashing 50 knots, with scary gusts. You also have to think that flights in and out of Cape Town may be under threat of cancellation or diversion, particularly during this particular peak.

Then its Stage 4, and the weather and wind, and rain, has gone nuclear. By now, the sea is a foaming mess: the kind of thing you see in deep ocean storms. Well, this one comes on a house-call, right up to your stoep Stu. You might have heard about white capping, when the winds are so strong that the tops of the swells are ripped off. We'll be approaching that right on the coast, with foaming wave-tops shredded by vicious wind - the ocean a heaving cauldron of mixed swell states.

RAIN REIGNS: A strong bout of rain moves inland tomorrow night after 10pm following smaller falls.

There will also be a mild storm surge due to the low pressure's central area of 1000mb passing closest to the coast between 4pm and 11pm. In the early hours of Saturday, and on Saturday morning, the ocean is at its biggest, with 10metre swells trying to hasten the geological evolution of the Table Mountain Super Group. Call it 40 foot and firing ... in ways unrelated to surfing jargon.

And then there is the rain. The rain is a weird one, but suffice to say that the dams might be a bit fuller come Monday's dam level results. There is no rain yet tomorrow morning, but after lunch, it grows increasingly wet, with showers growing more and more consistent, with a deluge passing across the SW Cape any time between 6pm and 3am, when flooding may occur. The rain continues more sedately all day Saturday. Skies start clearing Saturday evening with clear skies by midnight.

The wind abates all day Saturday, at first swinging strong SW in the morning, then fresh S into the afternoon, and then light SE by evening and by Sunday, its calmed right down, with a fat leftover swell now coming almost straight SOUTH, which fills in False Bay with a 4-6' swell, and calm variable winds with a touch of east in the puff, but otherwise glassy and clean with a sea that's calming down too.