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Downunder 2001!
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It was a little cool in Glen Innes, but we were 1000m up, so that explained that! We went to the library (free internet!) and had a look at the situation. There was a large area of instability over NE NSW - but there was also a large cap. We decided to head up to Tenterfield and across to Casino. At Casino, the temp was in the mid 30s with the DP in the mid 20s. It was HOT! We grabbed McDonalds and then drove to Michael Bath's place to see him. We had a quick look at the net, there were showers developing to the south. He said he'd get Rodney and Dave and go chasing with us if we liked - we said it'd be awesome to have him along for the afternoon and we met up on the other side of the ridge a few kilometres from MB's house that looked towards the south. We decided a game of cricket (not football!) was in order while waiting. Things were trying...but that's all they were doing, trying!
However, after a while one storm did go up to the south. We decided to try our luck and rapidly headed towards the highway to go south. But the storm had weakened and we were left wondering what to do.
We were just near the Evans Head turnoff - none of us had ever been to Evans Head before (except MB etc), so we said we wouldn't mind going to the beach. The beach was almost quite cool, there was a strong easterly blowing - but it was still nice to walk around for a little. We also looked at supercell dynamics from sand being blown up into some rocks, and the rocks angling to wind to create a permanent "sand vortex" being ejected out of one of the holes in the rocks! It looked awesome!!! And if you stood in certain positions to block the wind from one angle, then the vortex stopped. However, our attention was soon distracted towards a rather large CB that had developed explosively on the border ranges! Hungry for storms, we decided to head north towards it. But within 30-40mins, it too looked to die - certainly was getting annoying. We thought then it'd be nice to spend the night along the beach somewhere. First stop, Byron Bay! But that was totally full with schoolies week. So was Brunswick Heads...so we thought "Ok, we'll go back down to Lismore" it was about 50km away (we had now been looking for accommodation for an hour or so). We found the cabins near a lake. It was an err...interesting experience. Our headlights could barely pierce the thick swarm of bugs as we approached. We thought we’d give it a go…we turned the lights off in the car for a minute to try and wait for the bugs to leave, and then we all got out of the car and bolted for the door, opened it and went inside. It felt like it was 200C inside, there was no fan and no aircon. So we tried to open the windows…some of the windows didn’t have flyscreens and those that did were broken! So we looked around…and noticed a rather large abundance of cockroaches, on the floor, bench, table, chairs and on the bed! In the end we went back and asked for our money back – we got it back and went to Ballina where we finally got accommodation and also saw some offshore lightning while eating dinner! Report by Anthony Cornelius & Andrew McDonald |
