'Relief' wife caught in Hurricane Melissa is safe

Dave Swaffer in Portsmouth said WhatsApp messages to his wife were not going through

A man whose wife is stranded in Jamaica because of Hurricane Melissa has said it was "so stressful" not being able to contact her.

Dave Swaffer, from Portsmouth, said it was "very scary" after his wife Judith - who he first met on the Caribbean island 54 years ago - was caught up in the hurricane while she was visiting relatives.

With 145mph (233km/h) winds the storm was the strongest to hit the country in modern history.

Mr Swaffer said he "finally" got hold of his wife on Tuesday evening and was relieved to hear that apart from a fallen tree in the garden the "family was safe".

He said Judith told him on Sunday that they had a power outage and after that he was unable to reach her.

He added: "It was very scary and I knew they had got no power because I had been trying to WhatsApp and just the single grey ticks were coming up, so I knew she hadn't received any of the messages."

The couple met in Jamaica 54 years ago

Mr Swaffer said he and Judith met in 1971 when he was working at a high school over there.

He said he first saw her at a bamboo raft tourist spot where Judith worked.

"The next time I met her, I'd had far too many rum and cokes, was sat on the wall outside our local nightclub 'the shack' and she came over and suggested I sat on a chair rather than a wall and here we are 54 years later," he said.

He said because he knows the area so well it added to his stress.

"The guttering is almost a waste of time when it's raining so hard, it just pours all over the top," he said.

He added that the main fear for the locals in the east of the island, where his wife is, was that the nearby river would rise.

He spoke about the relief when he finally reached his wife on Tuesday evening when he could hear the storm down the line.

"It was raining really hard last night, very noisy on the corrugated iron roof. It just sounds like a load of shingle being thrown at a window," he said.

He also explained that the family was "going crazy trying to cook what was in the freezer because it was all defrosting".

"Until the power comes back on, they're just going to be relying on tinned and dry food."