The weekend was showing plenty of promise but overall it was a bit of a let down.  Yeah the photos of the storm on Saturday the 6^th were quite nice, but the 7^th was a huge bust for Dave and I, on a day that technically should have been one of our best chases of the year (but it just didn’t quite do it for us!).

We left a tad later than we should have on Saturday and headed out towards Toowoomba.  Storms were developing around the Dalby/Oakey area quite rapidly.  From Toowoomba we shot to Oakey and then headed north.  We *just* got in front of one storm that was developing some nice outflow features. 

Views were hard to come by, but we managed…including one near some high tension powerlines (which were rather uneasy, because they gave a very yucky static feeling on your head near them, so we tried to keep well away from them!) 

We were able to keep with it the storm up to Yarraman before it decided to go where roads didn’t.  So we headed northwards in the hope that some storms to its northwest would develop, but the outflow was too strong and it just killed everything. 

They did continue as showers/weak storms though and we continued northwards and then eventually east to Gympie in the hope that it would do something.  No go – but another line did develop behind it and we had some storms move through around 9:30pm which we watched before deciding to get accommodation in Gympie for the evening.

Overnight we were woken by some torrential rain and some closish CGs…during the morning it was a little cloudy at first but the cloud cover was rapidly clearing!  It was looking good with very healthy instability.  We sat at Gympie and waited, the Sunshine Coast could be OK or the Gympie area would be good…one of the two (or both!)  Well, how about neither?  Some storms developed southwest of Kingaroy – one cell in particular got more intense and began moving northeast.  Bingo!   Exactly what we thought could happen so we quickly headed west towards Kingaroy for intercept.  But the closer we got to it, the weaker it got (???), and then the storms on the southern edge actually became more intense and moved southeast over the Caboolture area just north of Brisbane.  We ended up continuing to drift back to Gympie with the hope that the showers and weak storms would do something…it was low 30s with DPs in the low 20s.  But not today…another massive right moving storm developed northwest of Maryborough, and since we were near Gympie we thought we’d give it a shot.  But we couldn’t get there in time before it moved offshore.  To add salt to the wounds, a storm developed behind everything else well west of Kingaroy with hail of 4-7cm recorded!  It looked to be the storm of the day with black on radar over 200km out.  We were too far though…and decided to slowly head home.  Some weak cells were drifting to the south of Gympie so we stopped there in the hope of some lightning.  Again, just some weak CCs and nothing fantastic.  However we did get a pretty sunset which was a consolation prize at least…! 

Still, it was very disheartening to have such a great day (and weekend), only highlighted by a brief chase near Yarraman after doing over 1000km all up.