Having a cell phone with a weather app has saved my bacon quite a few times. You can often see a line of storms or a cell approaching before you can see or hear it. It won’t catch those quick popup storms that form qyickly, but will catch 90 percent of incoming bad weather. As for those pop up storms, sometimes you can smell them before you see or hear them.
Using Weather Bug, spark I’ve been able to tell lightning was going to be missing us on a night paddle.
I use the free app, “My Radar” on my iPhone. Essential in Florida in the summer, it is especially helpful to be able to see the direction in which local storms are moving.
Circumnavigating Isle Royale in August of 2007 with my son and a friend, we got caught up in a storm paddling the northwest coast between Little Todd Harbor and Huginnin Cove, a 13 mile paddle. The NOAA radio had predicted a calm day, but a few miles out of the harbor we were met with dark clouds approaching from the southwest. That part of the island has a vertical rocky coastline with few places to take out - quite possibly the worst place to be in a storm. (The first two times I paddled Isle Royale in the early 90’s we portaged across the Greenstone mountains from MaCargo Cove to Siskiwit Bay to escape that part of the coastline).
Upon seeing the storm clouds we should have quickly turned around and paddled back to Little Tod. But we were on a schedule and didn’t want to lose a day siting on land. It turned out to be a stupid decision.
Within minutes the wind picked up to 20+ knots and the waves grew to 5-6 feet. Every few minutes a bigger set would roll through, something I’ve only seen in the ocean (perhaps one reason why Superior is called the Inland Sea). Lucky for us the wind was blowing directly in our face as my son and I were in skegless Nordkapps and my friend in a Chinook. The wind was so strong it was impossible for us to turn around so we just kept paddling. The wind would blow the tops off the waves causing them to break over our decks even though we were a quarter mile off the coast in hundreds of feet of water (trying to escape the waves reflecting off the cliffs). A wave knocked my detachable Silva compass from it’s deck mount and washed it away, as I was too scared to take my hands off my paddle and save it.
I’ve paddled 34 years and it was the only time in my life that I thought someone might not make it out alive. Had one of us capsized and missed our roll, I doubt if the other two would have been able to do a rescue. I don’t remember how many hours it took us to get to Huginning Cove but I do remember how grateful I was to be on dry land.
I don’t have any photos of that storm but here is one of a ominous frontal system coming through Englewood, Florida in 2016. Not as adventuresome as what I experienced in Superior but, at my age, I can do without all that excitement.
Just today I was totally focused on taking pictures of seals off Mount Desert island. Thats when I noticed the nearest bell buoy was ringing more quickly…I turned to see some kind of system in the sky. No rain but the wind picked up and shifted east…
ww paddling I got caught in a derachio on new river, wv, I sweated bullets during a lake crossing in Maine with a bunch of boyscouts in canoes… We sought refuge on an island. I always wear my pfd. You just never know when stuff is going to happen. Often a sudden wind shift (to a nonprevailing wind) will bring in a sudden storm. I know that sounds all very basic. Simply words to live by even for an inland paddler.