When I woke up on March 11, 2006 I didn't realize that before the day was over I'd become hooked into storm chasing as a new hobby.  By mid afternoon severe thunderstorms were erupting down in west-central Illinois northeast of Quincy.  My buddy Jeremy Ludin called, and we talked about making a run at the storms which were only about 100 miles south of us.  We had talked about chasing storms before, but never actually made an attempt to intercept any.  For some reason on that day, we actually decided to go.  

 

I was living in Colona at the time, and waited for Jeremy to get there.  He showed up a half hour or so later, and we jumped in his truck and booked south.  We had absolutely no chasing equipment with us.  Just our cameras and an old and beat up road atlas.  Not even a scanner or weather radio.  We made sure we got a real good look at the radar on the internet before we left, so we had a vague idea on where the storms should be by the time we got down there.

 

As we approached Galesburg from the north a few towers began to grow to our west.

 

 

We continued south and soon we approached a developing storm with a very large updraft base.  

 

 

We watched from the above location for a few minutes, but soon decided we were much too close and took off to the northeast to get ahead of it.  We stopped a few miles to the northeast and noticed there had been some rapid changes.  The large updraft had quickly become obscured by a thick curtain of rain and hail.

 

After we snapped a few pictures from the above location we realized this storm was moving pretty quickly, and was almost on top of us before we knew it.  We thought about trying to move, but soon the heavy rain quickly moved in.  Soon after the heavy rain began it also began to hail.  At first the hail was only pea to marble sized, but it quickly grew to ping-pong ball sized in a matter of seconds.  It hailed very heavily for a few minutes before it abruptly ended.  

 

 

After the hail storm we followed the storm for a ways in an attempt to intercept any tornadoes that may form on the back side of it.  The storm quickly pulled away from us though and we pretty much called it a day.

 

 

I'm not sure what exactly happened this day, but it sparked off an obsession that still burns to this day when it comes to chasing storms.  I guess it's kind of like hunting, except we're not hunting animals, we're hunting mother nature.  And instead of weapons we hunt with camera equipment.