I set up and began shooting.  I got the 2 shots above around 1 pm.  They are about 5 to 6 miles away.  Then, things went wrong.  The clouds were continuing to show development and drift toward me, but the lightning was now mostly in the rain shield.  A Harbour Police car pulled up to see what I was doing.  A young policewoman got out, told me there was no fishing allowed and asked me what I was doing.  Even though it was obvious that I was not fishing in the canal next to me, she was very reluctant to let me continue video taping.  I assured her that I had been told by another policeman the year before that it was no problem for me to do this.  The conversation went on for 17 minutes.  It took a while, but she finally agreed to let me keep at it.  She was quite nice about it all.

But for the entire 17 minutes we talked the camcorder kept taping.  Not one bolt struck in view.  The storm had continued to develop closer and closer.  There were a couple of bolts that struck to the left and right of the storm, and only about 1 to 2 miles away.  I wanted to pack up and get out of potential harm's way.  As soon as she left I grabbed everything and came to the front of the airport to shoot.  Skies were now showing signs of weakening with only a few bolts.  I had to manually rewind the 17 minutes of wasted tape to begin shooting again.  The wear and tear on the camcorder caught up with me.  When I got home I noticed some bad spots in the tape playback, so I cleaned the tape heads a couple of times.  I thought that would take care of things, but I was to learn otherwise the next afternoon.

Many of the bolts had multiple return strokes.  A number of these showed a distinct movement on successive return strokes toward the north in the direction of the wind and cell expansion.

The shots on the first 4 rows above came between 3:38 and 4:02 pm, facing NE out over the Lake.  They ranged between 3 and 6 miles away.  Then a few bolts began striking much closer as a new cell began to form over me.  I switched to face NNW.  At 4:07 a massive bolt struck the airfield as seen in the first shot on the last row above.  Lightning frequency was really decreasing and after the middle shot on the last row at 4:16, I backed the tape up to see how the big bolt looked.

As I began rewinding, I immediately saw that the tape looked very messed up which really upset me.  I put in the head cleaning tape and that seemed to do the trick.  I resumed taping and only caught one last bolt facing NW at 4:52 pm.

Once I got home I found that the camcorder did fine for the first 20 minutes of taping, and then it went crazy.  I tried making copies of the bad sections by using different slow motions.  I was able to get some clean stills for most of the bolts in the bad sections of the tape.

The big massive bolt would not make a good clean still.  The bolt itself looked okay, but much of the rest of the picture was bad.  A very good friend of mine, Mike Pendergast, is really talented at picture repairs and managed to make the clean still frame of the massive bolt for me.  Many thanks to Mike for his help.

Foolish me!  I thought the cleaning would fix the camcorder until after the thunderstorm season would come to a close.  I even did a thorough manual cleaning in addition to using the cleaning tape.  I called Sony and they told me that I would have to send the camcorder in for service if my cleaning did not work.  I did not want to miss any late season storms, so thoughts of buying a second one went through my head.  I would wish I had done this in just a few days.