Last night I camped on the beach. It was beautiful when I set up and went to bed, but I prepared the stakes for my rain fly just in case it did rain. I did not, however, go through the process of securing my tent in the case of severe weather. I knew there were storms well to the south of me, which I figured were moving west. What I didn't know was that there were storms brewing to the east of me, moving strait towards me.
Around 1am I thought I felt a few light drops of rain so I put on the rain fly, sacrificing the perfect breeze I had. I quickly fell back to sleep, and it barely sprinkled. At about 3am a gust of rain came through tested the strength of my tent poles. By the time that initial blast ended the rain and lightening were in full strength right above me. There is almost no time to make a decision to stay or bail out after that wind has hit. I probably could have just bolted to my car, but my tent and sleeping pad would have almost surely been somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico a few minutes later.
So I decided to ride it out in the tent, hoping the stakes on the rain fly held (just by chance the angle of the wind to the tent were ideal. The point when I began to second guess that decision was when a flash of lightning was proceeded so closely by thunder they were indistinguishable, and I felt a concussion (if that is even possible). After that happened once more about 15 or 20 minutes later I knew I was going to have to get out of there as soon as the next "lull" came. I put that in quotations because I just mean there was no lightening directly over me- I could hear it just to the west and east, which to me meant I had a small window of opportunity to take down my tent and not get struck while holding the aluminum poles. It turned out I was right, and by the time I started running to my car the lightening was back on me.
I rode it out for an hour, and by that time a lot of the roads in Key West were completely flooded. When I got home I checked out the radar and saw a lot of red.
