Nature: pretty badass

It was a nice sunny afternoon, until this beast showed up.  We thought the apocalypse had arrived.

We were like kids in a candy store during our first major storm (anchored at Allans-Pensacola). In retrospect it was rad, but during the peak of the storm we were pretty sure that getting struck by lightning was a very real problem. Seeing a neighboring boat start dragging anchor and heading into the rocks did little to calm our nerves. Matt and I stared at the vessel and wondered aloud what we could possibly do to help, with a dinghy with no motor and a boat of our own to look after.  We listened to channel 16 and felt helpless until we finally saw a light appear on the bow of our neighbor as they re-set their anchor amidst the squall.  Our anchors appeared to be holding so we unplugged our gps and electronics and counted the seconds between the thunder and lightning to convince ourselves that it wasn't as close as it seemed.  We calculated about 3000 lightning flashes that evening and later heard reports of 50 knot winds. How that much lightning missed all 4 big metal poles in the sky at our anchorage is beyond me.  Matt and I didn't sleep much that night, unlike Wookie who slept soundly during the entire storm and wasn't bothered a bit.  What a salty dog.