Decided tonight I was not going to wait for the storm to come to me, so got in the car and went to it.
Left about 9:30, and just going to fill up petrol saw some amazing crawlers across the west of the city. I ended up heading north through Doncaster, but was getting concerned it was dieing a bit. My aim was to intercept the main core somewhere north of Melbourne.
I did not see much as I headed up through Greensborough and most of the way along the northern ring road, but it started to fire once I hit the Hume. By the time I was heading past the Cooper Street turnoff (between Epping and Roxborough Park) it had started to fire back up. Once I started to get out of the main glow of the suburban lights, the brightness of the lightning was quite intense.
I eventually found a hill near Kilmore and thought it was as good a place as any to get some shots. The problem was that I was about half an hour too late and it was right on top of me. So, on a small, quiet road I set up pointing west in 50knt gusts and tried to get some photos.
This first photo was all in cloud, but it at least gives some visual of the core in the main line. There was a bit of low junk coming in from the north that obscured a lot of the structure through:
This second shot scared the berjesus out of me as it lit the entire sky up. There was a lot of crawlers trailing out to the south of this west-facing shot that are not in frame.
I got one more shot but the thunder was getting quite loud and had the odd crawler going over my head (plus was near the old chaser's friend the power lines
), so decided to get out of there. I headed down south somewhere around Wallan or Beverage to see the hill I was on getting smacked with CG after CG. There was some fat drops of rain coming down at this stage so could not get the camera out.
I thought I would go down towards the airport to see if I could get in a dry spot, travelling down Mickleham road in Mickleham (It would have been about 10:45 Phunkster). Got some heavy rain but not too bad - still enough to keep the camera in the car. Ended up watching the hills north of the airport again get smashed with CG's before trying to outrun the rain front. Ended up in Wattle Glen, where it was all crawlers and power lines again
so did not get out.
Ended up running smack-bang into the heaviest rain coming through Eltham, which was not so pleasant, and got home just after midnight having covered over 180km.
Bring on the next one
Rog.