Hey all, hope everybody is well!
We had a family camp-out at Bellows AFB a few weeks ago that I made reservations for back in April. A few days before our date there was talk of a large tropical depression heading towards Oahu. A very big storm that was going to hit another island first. Storms generally peter out by the time they get here so we pushed on with the plans. Twenty-eight people involved and nobody wanted to be the one to wimp out.
Most of us got there Friday afternoon and set up, the remainder were coming Saturday morning. All in all 7 tents and 3 of those pop-up sun shades were set up. Friday and Saturday-day, was beautiful. Everybody swam, we ate like kings. It was great!
Early Saturday evening the weather cooled, the wind kicked up, and the flies arrived. It started to rain around 9pm, just a light drizzle for a while and then a mild downpour for an hour or so. By midnight the rain stopped, the wind died, and we thought it was over. We patted ourselves on the back for sticking out the "big storm" and not bailing like many of the campers around us did. Like we all figured, the storm had petered out. (cell phones were all dead by now, no radio)
Around midnight the real storm hit; thunder and lightning like Hawaii rarely sees and the rain was coming in sideways. That lasted a solid 6 hours. My wife and my tent leaked, it was impossible to stay dry. By morning all 28 of us we were soaked and had not slept a wink. All-in-all more than 6.5" inches of rain came down in our area.
We got up with the sun and surveyed the damage. Our site was protected by trees and the tents were in tact but many of those in the open area weren't as lucky. I watched one guy drag the mangled corpse of a tent behind his truck. Where he was taking it to, I don't know. Quite a few tents were destroyed. We got lucky.
Trip to remember for sure. At first we were just freaking out about the abundance of centipedes around our campsite. Then came the fun.
