If you could re-document one chase...

[Brendon Lindsey]

If you could re-document one chase and not change where you were or the turns you took, what day would it be and why?

Mine would be May 23, 2008 of the tornado crossing over I-70

I had left the charger to the HD Camcorder at home in Enid, and depleted most of the charge on the 22nd on "meh" type of stuff. So the big day comes, I am filming the 3/4-1 mile wide wedge, and the HD camcorder dies, I then was stuck with a junk digital camera's video option. I seized to even take pictures of it crossing the interstate, I only took video. :/
This is the best tornado I have seen to date and there is hardly anything to show for it. It sucks and I was wondering if others had any scenarios they wish they could do over, like not hitting the record button.

Here is video of it all going from great to crap (video wise) :/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBzyfnN2H8s

 

[Marcus Diaz]

Easy...April 9, 2012

My mom wanted me tk see the potential of her new, yet crappy digital camera. For some reason I don't take mine at all, so I'm stuck with a camera I've never used and is mostly good for indoor family events.

Problem 2 occurred when my HD cam got nailed with a hailstone on the lcd screen, making it impossible to see if I'm in focus, looking at the right area, or even if I was recording (which I wasn't for a while). So there I am, standing in a field, massive rotating wall of black death to my north, multi vortex spinups to my east, and this anti-cyclonic tornado just next to me...and I have nothing to show for it.

 

[Skip Talbot]

May 22, 2010, Bowdle, SD. I literally have nightmares about being able to redo that day. Apart from missing an angle, I didn't really screw it up, which is the funny thing. We got spectacular stills and video of multiple tornadoes that day including the mile wide wedge. Still, I wish I could go back and do it differently. Stay with that wedge longer, get the other tornadoes from better angles, use the DSLR I now own instead of the advanced point and shoot I had back then. Most haunting was the little video probe we had with us that day. I was caravanning with Goddard and Sullivan. We had a GoPro in a steel enclosure with us and we got directly into the path of the wedge with time to spare. We could have easily dropped that probe off before we ducked south a mile to get out of the way. We all forgot about it in the heat of the moment though as it wasn't a priority and nobody was really focused on deploying it. In my dreams I get to do that tornado over. There are bleachers setup for the show and the tornado is usually funky and abstract, but I remember the probe this time, and have multiple tripods setup and ready to go.

 

[Terrence Cook]

Even before I saw Skip's post... This was my choice as well.

I was content with what I got, until I saw the absurd angle that Samaras and Discovery pulled off, including the dominator driving behind the thing like a Sunday afternoon cruise... F**K!

Second choice would be June 5, 2010... Just so I could watch all again ( evil laugh)

 

[Mark Blue]

May 22, 2010, Bowdle, SD. I literally have nightmares about being able to redo that day. Apart from missing an angle, I didn't really screw it up, which is the funny thing. We got spectacular stills and video of multiple tornadoes that day including the mile wide wedge. Still, I wish I could go back and do it differently. Stay with that wedge longer, get the other tornadoes from better angles, use the DSLR I now own instead of the advanced point and shoot I had back then.

I'm right there with you on Bowdle Skip. There was one point where the wedge tornado had crossed highway 12 moving northeast and was on the northwest side of Bowdle. We had a perfect chance to get in behind it and follow it down a country road due east at a safe distance (much like Reed & Co did), but my wife got scared of the debris swirling around the vortex so I relented and we took a different route and/or approach. I wish I would have demanded to switch positions so I was driving, but so goes the story. All in all it was our best chase to date, so I can't complain too much as others I know were stopped by the highway patrol miles away and couldn't even get there to see it.

 

[Rob H]

You guys don't have the right to complain about that day! This was *my* vantage point of Bowdle

I'd probably still pick 6/17/10 though. I saw a few tornadoes, but I missed the big show by 30-45 minutes, which is also the distance it occurred from my house. We originally targeted Alexandria, which is about 45 minutes away from Wadena where the EF-4 hit. We got almost all the way out there when ThreatNet broke and the GPS broke. After buying a new GPS unit at Best Buy and working with ThreatNet support, we got back on the road, but Wadena had already happened. So we bailed south through the Twin Cities. We got distracted by a brief tornado in Buffalo that we couldn't see due to trees and construction, and made it down to Blooming Prairie just in time for the last 3-4 tornadoes of the day. We missed the big photogenic Conger tornado, though.

I actually had a really bad record of missing big tornadoes by 30 minutes, and nailing many of the minor setups. I didn't reverse my luck until 4/14/12.

 

[Christopher E. Kincaid]

April 14th of this year... First I went to Nebraska. Then on my way to Kansas I decided to chase an isolated cell that got sheared to death. I should have stuck with my first target which was Witchita, KS. Oh well... still caught a couple of tornadoes, but had I not gone to NE I would have chased supercells and/or tornadoes all day in KS.

 

[Mark Blue]

All in all it was our best chase to date, so I can't complain too much as others I know were stopped by the highway patrol miles away and couldn't even get there to see it.

You guys don't have the right to complain about that day! This was *my* vantage point of Bowdle

I'd probably still pick 6/17/10 though. I saw a few tornadoes, but I missed the big show by 30-45 minutes, which is also the distance it occurred from my house. We originally targeted Alexandria, which is about 45 minutes away from Wadena where the EF-4 hit. We got almost all the way out there when ThreatNet broke and the GPS broke. After buying a new GPS unit at Best Buy and working with ThreatNet support, we got back on the road, but Wadena had already happened.

You're right Rob and that's why I mentioned those who missed out on Bowdle in the last sentence of my first post. My friend Stephen Locke told me about many chasers who were stopped by the state troopers, so I don't know if you were located where he was, but that's neither here nor there at this point. I'd also like to forget June 17, 2010, as we chased every tornado warned cell that day, except the one that hit Wadena. I'll say one thing, Minnesota has a ton of paved roads and is awesome for chasing in that respect, but they tend to wind around a lot because of the 10,000 lakes they claim on their license plates, so it can slow you down in that respect. We were hauling rear to catch up to the Wadena storm in an eastern direction, but when we met the Dominator on the highway and they were heading west I knew it was too late. It's a good learning experience to relive all of the chasing moments when you look back and think about what you could have done differently.

 

[Jeff Duda]

I'm gonna go with June 17, 2010. The exact moment I wish I could redo things is when we decided to stop about 3 miles west of Kiester, MN on 35th St. At that point, we had this view:

While not at all unimpressive, we had more than enough time to zip east a few miles and let that multi-vortex, pre-EF4 tornado basically cross the road on top of us. But no, safety-first me decided to stop and let it cross before moving on. In those few minutes, several Minnesota state patrol officers and local police caught up to us and proceeded to block the road for a few more minutes, so we lost even more time. For the rest of the time we were on that supercell, we were in catch-up mode and missed portions of the EF4 tornado in its strongest stages.

 

[Bob Hartig]

May 22, 2008, near Oberlin, Kansas. I had purchased my first DSLR--a Rebel XTi which I still use today--just two months prior. I knew nothing about operating the camera manually, but I didn't see that as a problem since I was quite comfortable with the auto modes and figured I'd be better off using those. Nice and easy--just point the camera and let it do the work.

Most of the storms were training northward that day, so there was a lot of seeding going on, which made for rain-wrapped tornadoes. Our first storm put down several tornadoes starting south of Oberlin and moving toward the town. I got a bit of crappy video with the sucky Canon camcorder I had at the time, and I'd love a crack at doing that over again with my Panasonic HD.

But my real bang-head-on-desktop moment came when we dropped the Oberlin storm, which was dangerously HP, and headed north, then east, and then back south to intercept another storm. The rotation was directly south of us when we arrived at US 36, and it was moving straight at us, so we jockeyed east a little way, then stopped. I noticed a slim tube well off to our southwest, and that had our attention for a second. But the real show was the bowl-shaped lowering just south of us. It spun up a couple of multiple vortices, then fattened out within seconds into a large, black cone that moved rapidly toward the highway.

I grabbed my camera, pointed, pressed the shutter, and...nothing. My camera wouldn't operate. This storm was one of the blackest I've seen, and the auto function of my camera simply refused to take pictures. The tornado crossed the highway about half a mile west of us, with me all the while trying frantically to get my camera to work. I managed to capture one or two shots of raindrops on the windshield illuminated by the camera's auto flash, set against an indistinguishable black backdrop. It was easily the closest, best encounter I'd had with a tornado up to that time, and I have absolutely nothing to show for it.

Lesson learned: Fully manual rules in dark storm settings. Manual focus. Manual shutter and aperture. Anything else and Murphy's Law applies.

 

[Shane Adams]

I'd love another crack at May 3, 1999 with the experience/knowledge I have today.

 

[Patrick Marsh]

Pretty sure that everyone on the Bowdle wedge had a better view than V2...

 

[Dave Gallaher]

In my case, it would be 'document' rather than 're-document.' On January 10, 2010, after a futile chase through a marginal setup in south Tennessee, I came home thinking, for the first time ever, that maybe it was time to give up chasing for good. Two hours later, a tornado came right up my street, taking down trees behind, beside and in front of my house. I stood outside and watched it, dumbstruck, and failing to fetch my videocam. As it turned out, the 6-foot deep ditch in my yard next to the street would have been sufficient shelter to lay in and photograph upward, giving almost a handheld probe view of the storm. One of the tree tops ended up in the ditch, but nothing else. I've kicked myself too many times over this already.

 

[Greg McLaughlin]

I would like to have April 14, 2012 again. I completely screwed up the perfect shot of two tornadoes moving in opposite directions by removing the camera from the dash mount. I tried to film the tornadoes by hand and found the 40+ mph winds to be too much to create a stable shot. I would also like to have May 25, 2012 to do over again. I wouldn't have moved to get closer to the tornado as it did its incredible rope southwest of Hays.

 

[Dan Robinson]

I'm generally happy with all my tornado intercepts, though there were instances where I could have easily been closer and had better contrast. April 23, 2007 Protection, Kansas; June 9, 2005 at Zurich, Kansas and April 11, 2011 Litchfield, Illinois are three of that case that come to mind.

I used to have the mindset to always stop and get video when a tornado was down, at the cost of contrast. Now I lean more toward sacrificing the amount of tripoded, distant video captured for the lesser but higher contrast video of getting closer. You always have to weigh each situation, but usually the better tornadoes will give you some time to get a little closer. 4/23/07 and 6/9/05 were times that I had plenty of time to get much closer, but instead chose to stay put for the full life cycle at a distance. No complaints with what I got those days, but always room for improvement.