Running the gauntlet...

Chase Day 1

Today was the official start to the chase week and despite a few drinks last night I was wide awake at 4:00 so did yesterdays blog and checked the Storm Prediction Centre forecast which had a favourable 5% risk.

I was still not feeling well and neither was Liam who had been on God's telephone. Anyway we crawled down for breakfast and I forced down some toast. We the headed to Wall-mart in our big black Chevy Suburban 4x4 to stock up on provisions including some local brewed Gaviscon.

Today's initial target was Amarillo, Texas so we headed off on the 240 mile drive down the I40. Fotunately the Gaviscon was working. I spent most of the morning trying to convince Liam that the money he still owed me meant he could pay it of by paying for all our hotel rooms this week. He finally conceded but with the look of a man who was convinced he was being ripped off. As if!

I'm way to tired to finish this now so it'll have to wait until tomorrow.

We’ve got some time today (Monday) so I’ve got the chance to finish off Sunday’s blog update offline which I can paste into the blog when I get internet access. It can’t be helped if you get behind, but you have to be disciplined and catch up when you can as otherwise the whole thing will fall apart and my readers will lose interest…both of them…

After we wandered around Palo Duro we got back to the business of storm chasing. SPC had downgraded the tornado probability to 2% so we headed south towards Lubbock, Texas.

We arrived in Lubbock and turned east down US 114 where we could see a tower going up at about 18:15. We kept going through some precip and got south west of the storm west of Levelland with a great view of the structure complete with a partial rainbow – a great photo opportunity.

The storm was moving at around 25 mph with a steadily increasing hail core. We retraced our steps and then headed north down a side road. We could see a group chasers parked up which included Roger Hill and Silverlining Tours. As we approached I spotted a brief swirl of a gustnado to our 8 o’clock. We turned round and headed south just as a huge gustnado crossed the road right across our path filled with the local soil. Wow! The whole area now was sucking dirt towards it creating a very eerie sight.

We headed east back on US 114 then north then east across the top of Lubbock. It was starting to get dark so we headed south back to Lubbock. You don’t want to be chasing in the dark as it’s way too dangerous especially as this storm had hinted at rotation. An early night, chill out and get sorted? Nope, as things transpired this was the start of a long night!

Peter booked us into a hotel and we hid unashamedly in a gas station to avoid any damage issues from the hail core. We then set off towards the hotel, and with the storm now heading in that direction we thought we could chill out and watch the lightning from the hotel as per the previous day. It was at that point that the cell became tornado warned so that plan went out of the window; you really don’t want to be in the path of a tor warned storm in the dark as it can really ruin your day.

We headed south east of Lubbock to skirt past the storm with a view to letting it go past so we could return safely to the hotel. Driving was now very difficult in the dark with driving rain. We got ahead of it and dived into a McDonalds for some “food”. We had to move very smartly as this cell had done a 90 degree right turn and was now chasing us! Reports also started coming in of a tornado and baseball size hail smashing the windshields of chasers and bystanders alike.

Peter navigated us out of danger and we ended up on a dirt road to watch the most incredible display of lightning I have ever seen with multiple flashes every second lighting up a fantastic storm structure. I set up the tripod and did my best in the blustery conditions to take some photos – photographing lightning is really demanding with the wind, in the dark and constantly having to review and alter settings by torchlight.

We then packed up and headed north west back towards Lubbock. A section of the road was covered with thick hail with a car in a ditch and visibility reduced by a fog of hail. Great driving by Jock at this point.

We eventually got back to Comfort Suites hotel in Lubbock at 23:50, backed up the photos, started the blog before falling into the equivalent of a medically induced coma.

Total miles 634