I concur with John about the weather being some of the craziest and dangerous I've personally witnessed while fishing. After making approximately a 28 mile boat ride upriver Saturday morning with my backseater Jerry Beatty we arrived at our first fishing spot around 6:30am with broken clouds,partly sunny skies and basically no wind- It couldn't have been more scenic out. I started fishing and hooked two really big fish within the first 10-15 minutes at our first fishing location but unfortunatley I lost both of them. I felt very optimistic however about what I was doing and figured I would eventually be successful if I just continued to do what I was doing....I couldn't have been more wrong.
Shortly after that I started to notice really dark clouds forming in the horizon and they seemed to be coming our way. Ten minutes later, the first rain drops started to slowly come down. The rain drops quickly transitioned from light drops to a heavy downpour within just a couple minutes. The rain was now coming down in sheets and was being accompanied by thunder claps, hail and lightning flashes. The one thing I didn't count on was the overall intensety of this squall. The lightning became so intense that it basically forced me to beach the boat so Jerry and I could wait the storm out under a small bush which felt safer than being exposed out in the boat and in the water near tall trees or powerlines.
We waited about 15-20 minutes until we felt the storm cell had subsized enough to safely wander back out on to the water to return to fishing. After dozens and dozens of casts without any bites, I decided to move our fishing locations to a different area across the river in slough where Jerry and I had fished Friday and saw two 4lb cruising largemouth and caught three smallmouth. As soon as we arrived to this spot a second storm cell crashed down on us seemingly out of nowhere. The same things were happening....heavy rain, hail, thunder and lightning,,,this time with more verocity. The lightning flashes and thunder claps were longer and more intense. We were in a small slough that only had tall trees surrounding which made us feel even more exposed than our first area. we decided to just stay in the boat and get as low as possible. As we're waiting for this particular storm cell to pass, I looked to my right and saw an extremely bright orange lighting bolt hit the ground less than about 50-75 yards from us which was shortly followed by a sonic boom. This thing was so loud it made your heart jump out of your chest.....really scary!!! As soon as this cell passed we deded to get the heck out of there and head back to the launch while we had an opportunity. This lightning event shook us both up so much we decided to stay off the water for the rest of the day.
I thought all of you brave souls who went to box canyon this weekend might find the following article interesting since it's labout Lightning awareness week. ...too funny- NOT!
http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/