Waterspout           Back to Goofy Stuff  /    Back Home

Thursday February 16 2005.  The Twin 150 Qualifying races at Daytona.  This is from the first one.  Rain delayed the start.  But finally, here we go.

I was recording the race on video tape.  I saw it - I asked Sue Unit...Did you see that?  No, she didn't.  I was sure I saw a tornado in the background.  Like everybody else, Unit was watching the action on the track.  A little while later there was a rain delay.

During the rain delay I rewound the tape.  I know I saw that.  And there it was on the tape.  The camera was looking at turn 2, toward the ocean.  A waterspout.

This is a lousy image, taken by camera from the screen of a small TV set.  If you recorded the race, play the first 150 race back at lap 23.  Pause the tape at this point.  A beautiful shot of a waterspout.  You can see it forming a few laps earlier on the replay.  It's on the right side of the screen.  It looks much better on the video than in this photo of the screen.

During the break between the races, I called the Daytona track.  I told the lady at the Administrative Desk what I had seen on TV.  She said, "Wow, that's amazing!  I can't see out from here, so I had no idea such a thing was going on."  She said she would call the Media Center and make them aware of it.  If she did, the talkers on TV never said anything about it.  They never saw it, or never chose to make note of it.