Lake Storm
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

JW: There are people who listen to weather reports and people who don’t. I used to be one who didn’t. Then, one breezy, May day here on a Midwestern lake near my home, all that changed.

BY: Commentator Jay Wilkerson from Mexico, Missouri.

There was not a cloud in the sky as I launched my small sailboat and erected the mast. I spent a beautiful day in the innocent pursuit of a relaxing hobby and anchored for a night of solitude in a secluded cove.

I never gave a thought to whether an electron was negatively or positively charged and could not have cared less if there was a balance between the two.

There were no telephones, radios, or TV's. It was idyllic. But I was about to find out that every silver lining is surrounded by a cloud. In my case, a big, dark, electric cloud that was... Well, lets just say it put the word, "fear" in atmosphere.

It let loose just before dark with an almost constant barrage of the most wicked bolts of lightning I had ever seen. I didn't know what to do.

The lake was up and the banks were flooded. There was too much brush in the cove to swim ashore and going back out to open water struck me as almost suicidal.

So There I sat, cowering from a sever, electrical storm in a cramped, carpeted, fiberglass cubical with a twenty-foot aluminum pole running through the roof. Oh, how I longed to get away from that pole. The fact that I did not keep all the promises made to my creator that night is a personal matter. But, There is one promise I've kept: When somebody says weather-- I listen!

Commentator Jay Wilkerson launches his boat on Lake Mark Twain in Missouri. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. Our program is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and Subaru of America.