Heart of the Nation: Tacking Point 2444
At 2.30am, while Port Macquarie slept, this storm cell put on what Will Eades calls “the greatest sound and light show on Earth”.
It was 2am and the sky over Port Macquarie was fizzing with electricity. Lightning flickered around the ocean headland on which Will Eades and his two mates stood, illuminating the scene intermittently like a malfunctioning tube light. The rumbling bass note of thunder was growing louder: something big was about to happen. Eades, a veteran storm chaser, loves moments like this: after all the waiting, all the delicious anticipation, to feel that electricity in the air and know that it’s on.
He checked his weather radar app and noted an isolated storm cell approaching fast from the west; its trajectory would take it right in front of them. He set up his cameras and they waited some more. And at 2.30am, while the rest of Port Macquarie slept, that storm cell parked itself a few hundred metres offshore and put on what Eades calls “the greatest sound and light show on Earth”, paraphrasing a line from his favourite movie, Twister. Thunderclaps split the sky, so loud they felt it in their chests. Lightning crackled into the ocean – this shot captures a bolt travelling down a wispy “rain shaft”, illuminating it from the inside – as the cell vented its pent-up energy. The boys vented theirs, too. “We just stood there cheering,” Eades laughs. “It was worth the wait.”
Eades, 35, is a man who knows how to wait. He and his partner Aimee planned to marry in the Whitsundays in March 2020, but had to cancel that due to the pandemic; three subsequent attempts to hold the wedding also bit the dust. They finally tied the knot last month. There was one tiny hitch, though. “I’d slimmed down in 2020, and when I tried on my wedding suit a couple of months ago it didn’t fit,” he says. “So I knew I had to either join the gym, or buy a bigger suit.” Well, it was obvious what the sensible choice was. “Yeah, I bought a bigger suit!”