Thunder
Downunder 2001!
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We awoke to cloudy skies...it wasn't looking that good a first (due to the cloud), but the cloud rapidly cleared to a nice unstable partially ACCAS-y looking sky which made things look much more excited! We went to the internet cafe at Mudgee and decided to head towards Gulgong and go to the lookout there. But it was too hot at Gulgong (no shade), so we found a park with some trees and a good view towards the west. The Cu was bubbling away nicely by 11am, but it was still quite dry, DPs were only in the low-mid teens. We decided to play around with the footy while watching...well, that was a little mistake! Unfortunately, Macca kicked the football over towards the cars - and with a lot of bad luck, it hit right on the centre of our windscreen and sent a bit crack/shatter across it! You would have thought that the football would be too soft to do any damage...but Murphy was to have his way. We contacted Mudgee to see if they had any spare windscreens for a Ford Telstar...it was a 3-4 day wait. We then contacted Tamworth - they had one left and could do it in about 2hrs. However, Tamworth was a good 2.5hr drive to our north! If we had any hail, the windscreen would have broken - so we had to get it fixed. We headed to Tamworth and just then things really started taking off to our SW (typical!) When we got to Tamworth we put the car in to get the windscreen fixed and decided to walk into the CBD and get access to internet. If we couldn't be under the storms, we could at least watch radar and give the other guys updates! We watched as a nice line of storms were developing on the trough to the SW, about 150 or so kilometres. We saw one large storm near Coonabarabran...and sure enough about 20-30 minutes later we got a call from James Harris "We just had 3cm hail, can you report it to the Bureau!!!" I phoned the Bureau for them to report it...it was the first of their awesome storms. The second storm was a fantastic LP supercell...coined as the "Mullaley Supercell" - some fantastic structure and a great twist. I'm pretty sure you can guess what happened after this - we got a call saying the windscreen was fixed, so we went back to pick up the car and pay the guy (we recommend OBrien Windscreens in Tamworth!!!) The storm was now about 50km from Tamworth, but when we headed out and got closer to it, the storm got proportionally weaker and smaller! Very frustrating!!! But at the end of the day, we had a good laugh over it (as frustrating as it was!) These things happen, and it's important to make light of them. At least the others were able to chase and they got photos and footage!
We headed back to Tamworth and decided to get pizza for dinner. We then met up with the other Vics - and ate pizza in KFC, while the others ate KFC <g> We tried to get in contact with James and Matt, but they didn't call until a little later when we had decided to head to Glen Innes (2hrs north) for the night. They were about an hour behind us, so they met us a little later. We did see some great
updrafts from some storms in the upper hunter later that day as we headed
north. There was also some lightning from that storm and to our NW,
but it wasn't overly frequent unfortunately!
Report by Anthony Cornelius & Andrew McDonald |
