Everyone involved in this tournament started watching weather radar apps shortly after the Day 1 weigh-in yesterday. A second storm this week was on the way. The first one, Tuesday night, dropped ping-pong ball size hail, destroyed crops and fatally injured wildlife ranging from pheasants to deer.
But most of our Bassmaster.com crew hadn’t arrived when that one hit. Our headquarters this week is the Steffen Brothers Lodge, a hunting and fishing camp located about 20 miles north of Pierre. The lodge faces west, which was the direction of last night’s storm front.
If you’ve been in this business awhile, you’ve seen more than your share of storms. And if you’re from Arkansas, like me, you’ve dodged, barely, a tornado or two. But this one ranks in my top five in terms of the ominous beauty of its approach. The darker-than-dark storm front gradually closed out what had been a blue, mostly cloudless sky.
Storm chasers, we are not. But storm facers, yes we are. As you can see from the photo above, several of us grabbed our phones and gathered on the gravel road across Highway 1804 for an unobstructed view. Photographers James Overstreet and Andy Crawford had their professional gear out. Crawford positioned himself in a nearby cornfield for the beautiful photo below.
This storm fits the definition of awesome: “extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.” And we couldn’t keep our eyes off of it. Until that is, the gravel road in front of us exploded into a brown river of a dust storm. Then we ran like scared children for the lodge.
Hard rain blew sideways for the next hour. It was strong enough to push a heavy cast-iron grill skating into the parking lot in front of the lodge. It took two of us to lift the grill upright, and the wind had blown it around like a baby stroller.
What’s all this got to do with the Berkley Bassmaster Elite at Lake Oahu presented by Abu Garcia? Only this: The anglers practicing the day after the previous storm hit this week noticed are marked decline in the bass fishing. The lake was “trashed.” They’ll likely find more of the same today.
