The green lit has been given for the first multi-day outing of the season! Spending a few hours this afternoon readying the gear as this will be my first run with ALL the new gear and setup. My Illinois chase included the tablet run, but since then, new cameras, a new windshield mount, new tripods, the works. So taking a little extra time, more so than usual, just to get squared away, particularly with the new windshield mount which has been a long time coming. Very excited to see how smooth that makes running the dash camera. The new tripods will also get their first real work in, so I hope the new system I am rolling with is seamless and smooth. We’ll see. Unfortunately these early season chases don’t often yield tripod-able moments as the storms are typically hauling, so my hopes for Thursday extend to a slower moving setup and perhaps the opportunity to shoot some lightning, which will be a good break-in for the new tripods. Cleaned and wiped down the interior, and am getting her ready for an early season extended trip.
This all starting with Thursday, then going into the weekend with Friday remaining the big day of note to this series. Perhaps we extend into Saturday down across northern Texas, but I’m not overly wild about that at this point. We’ll get Sunday down before the next system rolls in early next week, which may offer up more potential then. But we’ll gloss over that for now as the focus lies with what’s directly ahead. And that’s Thursday and Friday.
The SPC Day 3 (for Thursday), will kick things off for us as we’ll depart tomorrow to get into position, probably targeting our overnight stop somewhere in the Texas Panhandle and we’ll get up to look things over to decide where we’ll target for Thursday. I like this day for chasing IF we can get a couple storms up before dark. I think the tornado potential will go up after sunset, but any daytime storms oughta yield some solid views and probably some solid hail as well. We’ll track these storms north and east as we work our way to Friday’s target…
Which remains up in the air. The potential for this day has gone back and forth, but seems to be getting two steps more potential for one step less, so I’d say it’s ticking up a bit. SPC plopped a 30% in for the Day 4, and I would agree with that sentiment. Friday has a high ceiling, but could be messy; these early March setups don’t like to play like the May setups do as the cold fronts tend to crash in more unless the system slows up a bit. Regardless, depending on where we bunk down after Thursday, we should be pretty solid to cover anything we want within the risk area, so we’ll keep tabs on everything heading into Friday morning before we make any calls on what and where. Thursday plays very well into positioning for Friday, so that’s always nice when that happens.
So yeah, the excitement builds as I get ready to hit the road. Season 30 got underway a couple weeks ago, but this feels like truly the start to the season for me. And despite the ‘well timed’ spike in gas prices, I’m eager to get wheels up tomorrow!
