A Nightmare Come True: The Loaner Factor

A few days after our initial rental fiasco, we were actually able to successfully rent a car. However, as careful as I was, keeping us out of hail and getting perfect position more than a few times during the day, the storms just wouldn't produce while we had excellent views. This would become the theme for the rest of the year, as we were tethered to a vehicle which couldn't receive hail damage. A friend loaned us one of his old spare rides, completely unsolicited (as did Mr. Ben Holcomb back on May 5, 2009) which was a wonderful gesture. I gladly accepted, because chasing or not, a vehicle is necessary when you live twenty miles from where you work. Daily life went on as normal, uninterrupted. However, as far as chasing was concerned, this created a whole new level of difficulty.

For the rest of the year, our chasing life became a game of "hope the storm does exactly what you need at exactly the right time", which anyone in chasing worth their salt knows translates into "you're fucked." Having to have a storm produce tornadoes at the precise moment when you can see them and be free of hail danger, is basically chasing with handcuffs. For starters, you need the right storm mode; classic or LPs are the preferred type. Once you establish that, you need a storm to form in an area with a good road network, that suits the storm's path. Once you establish that, you need the storm to produce a tornado while you're in the slim window that having all the other stuff fall into place creates. And the chances of that happening often enough to count on? Virtually zero. For us in 2011? Actually zero.

A great race driver once said: "you can take a great driver and put them in a sorry car, and they won't win. You can take a so-so driver and put them in a great car, and they might win." Translate that over to chasers and situations, and you have our year in a nutshell. Sure, I made plenty of mistakes in the field, as I normally do over the course of a chase season. However, rarely was I "fully armed" to chase the way I normally chase. In fact, thinking about this the other day, I went back and looked over our 2011 results. I came away with an interesting little stat: out of 17 chases, 14 of which were busts, there was only one chase where we busted on a day that had tornadoes, while we were in our own car (chasing normally). The rest of our failures were directly linked to rentals or the loner, and the fact I spent more time, focus, and energy avoiding hail instead of trying to find tornadoes. It still doesn't make me feel any better about what we missed.