What a great day. A NSW Australian Severe Weather Association meeting was held at my parents place during the afternoon. We planned to have a BBQ and watch storm video's during the afternoon. There was a chance of storms during the day, so we all had one eye one the sky. After eating a great BBQ and watching some video's (including Sam Barricklows 2001 chase tape with brilliant time lapse video), some of the weaker towers we observed earlier had started to really take off. We were all standing in the middle of the street watching, and a decision was made to chase.

Erin and Mario jumped into my car, Matt Piper and Terry into Daniel Weatherhead's car, Geoff and David Croan into Jimmy's car. I lost sight of Malcolm Ninnes unfortunatly, as it was great he let us use his laptop to get a radar update before we chased.

We headed for the Hume Highway that heads towards Bankstown. Here we lost Jimmy and Daniel as we stopped for a brief period to observe the storm base, now to our SW. Clear air CG's were observed comming from the top of the updraught, great to see!

We continued on to the M5 motorway which took us SW towards Liverpool. Along the way the main updraught was very strong, a solid base and rain curtain. The anvil was streaming off to the ESE/SE and was very thick. I was very excited and knew we had a big storm on our hands. As we approached the sun was a real pain, making conditions very glary. As we got more glimpses of the base through tree's, it was obvious a large wall cloud had formed. All 3 of us in the car were full of anticipation as we drove closer and closer. Not having my street directory was to be our only mistake this chase. We had to turn off the motorway and had to stay on the northern side of the storm as it moved north. This was extremely difficult as none of us had any idea which main road headed in a general northerly direction. We ended up down some side streets with a slight elevation where we could watch the wall cloud approach.

This was one of the most amazing things I have seen whilst chasing. Being so close to such a photogenic wall cloud, and only 20-30 minutes earlier we had been watching this stuff on video back home, and now it was right infront of us, the chaser excitment was boiling over. We soon realised we could not keep ahead of the storm. As the edges of the wall cloud passed over our head, a brief funnel became visible and I snapped a quick photo. I was a little worried but we were in no danger if it had touched down. We could see the core of the storm behind the wall cloud approaching, so we turned off onto another side street and and tried to keep away from powerlines and tree's. Strong winds now ripped through the area just ahead of the core. As the core hit, it was amazing. Tree's lent over on angles and heavy rain ripped through the area driven by winds easily over 100km/h. We lost site of the wall cloud and had to ride out the storm. Small hail was falling, around 1.5cm-2cm, nothing too significant. (Daniel reported 3.5cm hail!) The lightning was also incredible. In a space of about 5 minutes, we had about 20 flangs, closest within 50 metres hitting just behind a house on the opposite side of the road to us. Massive constant cracking thunder, torrential rain and hail blown by huge winds, we were loving every second of it. We rang the Bureau spotter line to put in a report about what we had seen.

As the storm continued north, we were left to watch it head off. There was no way we could have chased it into the northern suburbs of Sydney. The west and SW suburbs were a mess. We drove around and came across hundreds of tree's down. Large tree's all over the place down facing in a N/NE direction. The wind with the storm had caused mayhem. We saw tree's across powerlines bringing them down, tree's on houses, on parked cars, on roads, everywhere. A massive cleanup was ahead and residents in every street were outside counting the cost of the storm on their property. Traffic lights out everywhere and some great area's of flash flooding had to be driven through.

About 20 minutes after the storm we met up with Daniel and his crew, to learn they had ridden out the storm about 5km north of where we did. Where we met up, tree's were down everywhere, and at tbe bottom of a large hill, a car was 1/2 submerged in water due too flash flooding that had covered the northbound lanes. Traffic was at a near stand still and we watched the storm in the distance spew out a hail core. It also had a fantastic flanking line that stretched for many km to the west, and an ragged inflow band was also visible to the NE.

After a while observing the damage, storm in the distance and a strange very small LP type storm just to our west, we decided to go home, but not before watching some lightning out to sea and to the far north in the evening.

Everyone met back at my place where we ordered pizza and watched the videos people had taken for the day