If you're in Cornwall this week and planning on going anywhere near the sea, make sure you take your armbands, or at least something else nice and safe to keep you afloat, like maybe a dinghy or something. Especially on Wednesday and Thursday. Why? Because there's a hurricane swell a'coming... Well kind of.

SLUT TOWERS / 10AM TUES 8TH DEC 09
This dirty great beast of a storm is hoovering up half the North Atlantic as I write, and by the look of it, blasting her wrath straight at our shores.

For some reason weatherman only give fancy names to storms (like "Hurricane Bill") when the storm meets the certain parameters they've set to officially define them as a Hurricane, Tropical Storm, Typhoon etc. It has to be in a certain part of the ocean, and exist at a certain pressure, at a certain latitude, blah blah. It's not just down to sheer size, so this leaves most of the biggest storms of the winter like this going past without a name, which to me seems a bit unfair. If smaller storms can have special names just because they move in a special way, then why can't the biggest ones. just for being so bloody massive? Well now they can... 

We've decided that if the Met Office can't be bothered to christen her, then we'll do it  (they're probably too busy bailing Climategate scientists out of the shit anyway), so seeing as she looks quite the violent type, we hereby name this one "Thumper". Or if you're feeling extravagant, then you can even call her "Hurricane Thumper" if you like.

Fingers crossed the Surf Gods smile on us when the brunt of her waves hit our shores over Wednesday and Thursday. The wind forecasts are looking pretty good at the moment, so we may even see some decent surf from her. But being Sunny Cornwall, land of the howling southwesterly, it's probably best not to get our hopes up, so we'll just have to wait and see what Thumper brings.

We'll let you know if anything exciting happens anyway ...come on Thumper, show us what your made of!

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Here's a photo we recently stole from one of the UK tabloids, of some waves beating the hell out of Porthleven (just down the road from Slut Towers), during the last massive storm that hit back in November. Despite being way bigger than most of the so called "hurricane swells" earlier year, this storm didn't get given a fancy name either. Scandelous.