Thunder
Downunder 2000!
Photos by Anthony
Cornelius
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It was yet another rather eventful morning to start with Clyve getting up to mischief again! I was sharing a cabin with Clyve, so I was immune to his tricks and up early anyway. But Jane had suggested that a shaving cream attack could be launched on a couple of unsuspecting people, Macca and Matt were still asleep! I grabbed the video camera, and we went into the other cabin. Unfortunately, Macca had just woken up (fortunate for him), so Clyve had to aim for Matt. Dropping a handful of shaving cream into Matt’s ear, he woke up in quite a startlement! Unhappy though (as Matt always is when woken up!!!), he went to clean up. Of course, that was not to go unpunished, and as retribution Matt placed hair-gel under the handle of Clyve’s car when he wasn’t looking! Certainly a fun start to the morning! The discussion was somewhat divided onto where to go, it was generally decided that we’d go back down towards Gunnedah and head towards Tamworth and Armidale. On the way to Armidale though, we were fortunate not to witness one, but three different funnels produced by some congesting Cu!
It was quite impressive, they were only thin funnels but they had descended a reasonable way down and there was no doubt about them! This added a bit of fun to the trip. We headed up further north to Glen Innes – later realising it would have been quicker to come in from behind, but the action had developed further north than we had anticipated. The SE’ly was pushing up along the coast and into the ranges, it had produced a brilliant bank of CJs.
We decided to head a little out of town to the west of Glen Innes towards Inverell and watch from a distance – more so because we could take more in. It didn’t look like it was going to take-off for a while, but it did! And boy did it take off violently, the convoy of cars raced back to Glen Innes, with Clyve leading the pack – that Festiva can sure fly when there’s storms around!
Clyve had left us for dead, with Jane not far behind. We got stuck behind a couple of slow cars and head to wait for an overtaking opportunity, although were even more eager when we heard Clyve screaming over the CB “There’s a #$^*&@b funnel at the back of this storm!!!” The reaction was a car screaming at 4500rpm trying to gain lost ground! We got back into Glen Innes – Macca nearly fell out the window at one round-about, before we headed to the Stonehenge lookout just a couple of kilometres south of the town centre we watched a developing gustfront to the south, and CGs strike around the fields.
Macca had the camera poised on a nearby radio tower for about five minutes…but to no avail, he turned it off and walked around the shelter in discuss, his back facing the radio tower. You can of course guess what happened – a brilliant CG struck the tower about 20 seconds after he had stopped filming, followed by a terrific crack of thunder! He wasn’t impressed!
Macca and I decided that we’d prefer to stay ahead of the storm and get some more footage, we raced back out onto the highway towards Inverell and watched CGs strike over Glen Innes, and the storm take on some interesting features, one appeared to be some weak rotation on the entire storm.
Matt and Greg had also decided to do the same, and videoed and photographed a nice wallcloud and funnel to the north – but we didn’t say that from our position due to trees! However we did get photos of the other part of the storm, and we think we got the same CG Jane got when the CG struck a building they were driving by earlier! All on video – Clyve’s car actually got shifted sideways from the thunder – and Michael Thompson saw lightning debris across the road in front of them! The video is great, you can’t see the strike, but you hear the “BAAAAANNNGG-uck” – the uck coming from a small word Jane used to describe the fright/excitement of it all!
The storm continued further north, Matt and Greg found a road to chase it further on, so they were lucky and eventually got to see the wallcloud and funnel! Macca and I decided to head back to Glen Innes and look for any damage. On the east side of town, it was absolutely freezing! We suspect there was hail, but it had melted – the temperature was something insanely and unbearably cold like 12 degrees.
Realising the potential for a sunset, we decided to stay to the east for town for a while and take some footage and video of what was a brilliant sunset. Of course, we were thought to be cops and speed camera by some people – somewhat comical having people flying around the corner at 120-130, before slamming on their breaks. One poor woman though was driving past us when I was taking a photo of something else – I had accidently turned the flash on and it had flashed while she was driving by! The look of horror on her face made me feel guilty, as it was an accident – however I’m sure that in the longrun it was good, because I’m sure she wouldn’t have sped much after that – hence perhaps it was an inadvertently good deed!
We headed back to Glen Innes, grabbed some KFC and went back to the motel room. This was the first chase we had done with so many different videos and angles of the storm! It was great having so many people scattered around the same storm and seeing different angles of everything. We decided to go to bed and call it a night later on. Report by Anthony Cornelius & Andrew McDonald |
