And then came the hail.

The title says it all.

Here are some photos taken over the weekend. The wind had been back to normal over the last few weeks. New, non-malformed pitchers were up, replacing the manky looking ones. Everything was looking magnificent.

And then came the storm. Typical Bureau of Meteorology: the public pages said “chance of thunderstorms”. But the pay-to-see aviation service pages had maps showing high risk of severe storms over a large swath of New South Wales, with Canberra right in the middle.

So, around 6 PM, the skies darkened and it quickly grew quite ominous:

The storm dumped pea to small marble hail on us for 5 minutes. Lots and lots of close lightning strikes too. We got 23 mm (nearly 1”) of rain in about 10 minutes. We were lucky; a few kilometres away there was hail slightly larger than golf balls.

Here is the aftermath in the collection. I would hate to see what golf ball hail would do:

 

Well, it least the rain brought out some food:

Till next time.